Bill Reffalt oral history transcript

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Bill Reffalt, interview Oct. 12, 2006, Albuquerque, NM
Interview consists of 4 DVDs, the audio portion of which is copied onto 4 Maxell C120 audio tapes. This transcription was taken from the audio tapes.
The speaker seldom used the term “going to” almost always saying “gonna” and I have used that term throughout unless the speaker clearly said “going to.” Also “kinda” for “kind of” and “‘cause” for “because.” Although the speaker most often left the “th” off of the word “them” I have not used the slang terminology “ ‘em. ” “Gonna” “kinda” and “‘cause” are not usually recognized in most dictionaries as “real” words, but are used so often in everyday conversation that they are well known and are recognized in the spell check of most computer word processing programs. “ ‘Em”, while recognized by many dictionaries as the dative plural of “he” or “him” (Old and Middle English), is less well recognized by computer word processing programs. . If a word or numbers (tape counter notation) appears in “( )” with a “?” or in pink – I could not hear or I’m not sure I heard it right. Words or partial words appearing in [ ] are ones that I put in to clarify the thought. Proper names that I could not verify the spelling of show up in red text.
Others involved with the interview:
Dr. John Cornely --- Video equipment operator
Paul Tritaik – map roller
Christine Enright – Mr. Reffalt’s wife
Mr. Bill Reffalt is the speaker unless otherwise noted.
Start of Tape 1, first set of tapes; Start of Tape 1, second set of tapes
BR – Bill Reffalt
NO – Norman Olson, interviewer
************************************************************************
Ok, tapes on.
NO – Hello. My name is Norman Olson. I’m a retired US Fish & Wildlife Service employee and a volunteer at the Service’s National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Today is Thursday, October 12th 2006, and it’s about one o’clock in the afternoon. My guest is Bill Reffalt and this interview is being conducted during the Fish & Wildlife Service retirees’ reunion in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bill is also retired Fish & Wildlife Service employee and we are actually filming this interview at Bill’s home here in Albuquerque. Bill, I wonder if we could begin by having you tell us your full name and please, spell it for us; when and where you were born and raised; when and where you went to college; the degrees you received; how you came to work for the Fish & Wildlife Service; and how you first became involved with Alaska Lands issue during the 1970s.
BR – Sure, Norm. My name is William Reffault, although I’ve gone by Bill almost my entire life. And the name is spelled R E F F A L T. I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, and went to high school there. Joined the military from that post, and then came … when I came back, I went to school at both Boulder -- which is the
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University of Colorado -- and then transferred to Colorado State University and into the School of Forestry and Range Management at CSU. And that’s where I got my bachelors degree, and did some work on my masters. But I never finished it. I had a family and three children and had to … had to get out and earn a living. So, I moved on. While I was in college, at the end of my first year as a matter of fact, I received a … an inquiry from Region 1 of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife asking me if I would be interested in being a student trainee at the Desert National Wildlife Range in Nevada, during the summer. And I accepted that position; not realizing at the time that I accepted, by the way, that if I preformed satisfactorily, and didn’t make anybody mad, that I would automatically continue in that program and be offered a job when I graduated. But I found that out as I got into the program. And so, ultimately, that’s why it was easy for me to continue on. Although I did look at state management, the usual conservation officer type jobs, and so forth, and decided that I wanted to be permanently with Refuges.
So I graduated in ’63, and went to Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge in Idaho -- as the Assistant Manager. Um … as I moved through the system, and continued moving around -- 14 times in the first 6 years or 7 years I was with the Service -- I ended up at Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge here in New Mexico. And then I was selected for the Departmental Training Program, off of the station. And after 6 months in Washington, DC, why, they didn’t want me to leave Washington. They tried to keep all the Departmental Trainees and put them into jobs up in Washington. And didn’t want to stay -- and I couldn’t afford it, with my three children and stuff. I … Washington was awfully expensive. So I told them I had to come back to … to the Region, and they said, well, you can’t go back to Refuges. So I got the assignment with Federal Aid, and came back to Federal Aid in Albuquerque; and spent about a year and a half, almost two years, there. And then I transferred back to Refuges in the Regional Office here, just before they dissolved the 8 state Region and recreated the 4 state Region.
And it … it wasn’t very long after that … I did … I transferred to Refuges in approximately early ’71, and suddenly, in late December of 1971, I get a … a telegram requesting my presence in Washington, DC, with the … with the Division of Refuge Management, to work with Larry Means -- Robert L. Means, actually -- on implementation of Alaska, on a two to three week detail. And so the Regional Office agreed to it, ultimately, and I went in -- probably the second week of January 1972, which was a little less than a month after the Act passed -- the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act [ANSCA]. And we’ll get into what that Act did. But, that was my first involvement.
And between then and … and about July of 1973, I went back in there about 6 or 7 or 8 times; anywhere from two weeks … I think my longest stay was four weeks; again working on and becoming more and more and more familiar with what was … what was being called for. So, it became easier and easier for them to ask for me, and harder and harder for me to say no. Because … it is a very complicated Act and … and it requires certain things, and once you learn those things, why, it … it’s harder for them to try to replace that background. And so, it … it’s just like I said.
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It’s sort of like … it was a train running down a track and you got on and you sort of stayed on unless you got … either fell off or they pushed you off.
But that’s how I came to be involved. Um … and … and I started working, again on assignment, with Larry Means who was … Robert L. Means -- he was with Fish & Wildlife Service for a number of years, Refuge Manager in several stations. I think his last refuge station was the National Elk Refuge in Wyoming. And then he went to Washington in the Planning … in the Planning Branch of the … of the Refuge Division; and where he worked for one Harry Crandell. And I bring his name up because it will come up again in this conversation. But … even before the Act passed, I’m not exactly sure when, but I believe sometime in about 1969 or 1970, when … when it was clear that if the Alaska Native Claims Lands Act, as they were calling it, was actually passed, there was gonna be a provision in there that called upon the study of all the lands in Alaska with the possible future recommendation for national parks, national wildlife refuges, wild and scenic rivers …. And … so they assigned Larry to track the legislation; become familiar with what was going on; sort of monitor and keep involved with it. And when the Act actually passed on December 18, why, he sort of was able then to hit the ground running. The Area Office in Alaska, also, was hitting the ground running. And by January of ‘72, when I … just shortly after I first went in there -- it arrived while I was there, there was an entire package of materials -- about 150 pages or so of materials, and I have a copy of it here -- that was sent in by the Regional Office, which identified interest areas for the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife all over the state of Alaska.
And those interest areas where identified because of the expertise of the personnel of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife who had been in Alaska -- some of them for 25 / 30 years. So, they put that package together, running like mad. The Park Service and the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, neither of which had offices in Alaska, both established offices in January of ‘72, and … and turned loose teams of their own. The Park Service had some experience in Alaska that dated back … I think the Sitka Monument was established around 1909, but that wasn’t their main involvement. I think McKinley National Park, which was established in 1917, gave them a presence, and … and … and some of their personnel were quite knowledgeable about Alaska. But, in any event, they had to send … they had to pick people and send them up there and so forth. They were just a little bit behind.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act … I think we probably need to discuss just a little bit what it … what it did, and why it did it, as we go on. The … the Native Claims Settlement Act was destined to happen sometime … beginning in 1884. At that time, shortly after Alaska was purchased from Russia, the Congress of the United States, in trying to implement and … and deal with this new territory, or possession as they thought of it at that time, it wasn’t even an organized territory, and the Organic Act [was] to sort of make it a territory and treat as a little bit more like a territory, they recognized that there were long standing aboriginal claims to land occupancy, and to the use of the resources of those lands. And they … they felt they had to do something with it, and so they put a provision into the Alaska Organic Act that said that … that the Alaska Natives claims would be dealt with by the
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Congress of the United States -- nobody else … the territory couldn’t do anything about it; the state couldn’t do anything about it; or whatever. That they would take care of it.
Well, as is not untypical for our Congress, things then languished for three quarters of a century, and they didn’t really do very much about it. The Natives themselves were not an organized entity, because there are four major tribal divisions -- some would even say more than that -- but there are at least -- the Aleut … or, yeah, the Aleuts in the Aleutian Islands; the Eskimos, broken into two major groups -- the Yupik Eskimos and the Inuit, the North Slope; and … and the Indians, which break into several groups -- the Haida, the Kutchin [Gwich’in?], and at least one or two other subgroups, in southeast Alaska. And they had warred, as many Indian tribes did throughout the United States and elsewhere. And weren’t terribly friendly, although they did have trade arrangements and so forth.
But, as things continued to press upon them, beginning with the Statehood Act, which was passed by the Congress in 1958, signed into law by President Eisenhower in January of 1959. As that happened, and the state moved forward in … it’s extraordinary Statehood Act, which I’ll have to talk about in a minute … but as they moved forward, they started impinging upon the Natives. They started impinging upon their lands; they started impinging upon the areas that they used for subsistence. This whole modern entity was coming down on the Natives, and they really weren’t prepared for it. And they didn’t like what they saw at the first. And then, of course, the federal government was pretty heavy handed also -- and had been for a long time.
So, the Natives … I think there were a couple of things that happened that sort of pushed them over the edge. One of them was Project Chariot. And Project Chariot, for those [of you that] don’t know or remember it, is one of the peaceful uses of the atom bomb that we tried to work on back in the very early … late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Project Chariot would have exploded an atom bomb just off of Cape Thompson, in northwest Alaska. And by so doing, it would create - in theory - a deep-water port. In case you want to know where Cape Thompson is, it’s right up here. Now, normally the sea ice comes down as far as somewhere in the vicinity of St. Lawrence Island – here - sometimes coming all the way down to Nunivak Island, but not as frequently. So, and there is no deep-water ports all along this coast, after … frankly, after the Aleutians, this all becomes fairly shallow all the way up through there … and all of this has … has … you have to use littering to take goods and services into these … all of these areas. So, a deep-water port here would have permitted resources throughout the north … the theory was … the resources throughout the north … and there is a huge amount of coal, which is basically uneconomical because there is no way to get it out. And so Project Chariot, I think, was aimed at things like that.
But, Project Chariot as … as you might imagine also scared everybody. And particularly, it scared the Natives up there. And they found themselves bonding
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more and more together; the issues were becoming a common threat and … and eventually a brotherhood grew out of the Project Chariot … a Native brotherhood.
There were other things … there were … there was a major proposal, after the state had selected some lands over by Fairbanks, there was a major proposal to develop a … a normal white mans recreation area on that site. And it turns out that the site was … just considered a vital subsistence area for the village of Minto. And … and so they started fighting that and they … they gathered forces and … and, of course, got some white interest also, but it was mostly a Native kind of thing and ….
And then of course, in 1968 they discovered oil on the North Slope. And the trouble with discovering oil on the North Slope - right up here - is that you immediately have the problem of how do you get it out. And you have to use ice-breakers if you’re gonna … if you’re gonna try to do it by ships. And again, you’ve got all those shallow waters; you’ve got that ice. You’ve got 200 miles, or more, of ice. We don’t have any ice-breakers in our fleet, and have never had an ice-breaker in our fleet, that could go through that kind of ice - that far. So, ice-breakers were being looked at, but they weren’t considered the best option.
The resource, as the oil companies knew but nobody else did, was huge. It was an extraordinarily large field, what they now call a ‘super giant field’ and … and probably had somewhere between 20 and 25 billion barrels, in place resource. Primarily oil hydrocarbons, although it also had gas. They were … they expected initially to be able to recover between 8 and 10. That would be a normal recovery rate. But that’s 8 or 10 billion barrels. We don’t have any other place in the United States with that kind of resources.
So they had to move a lot of oil. And it was going to be an enormously wealthy kind of thing to do.
So the other option was to look at an overland exit. And that’s 800 miles from up there to down here, to the deep-water ports that are ice free. There was another possibility to come down around these mountains and through them and over to the McKenzie Valley. And there was a proposal that might have taken it along the coastline. But both of those would have put our oil shipments into Canada, and there was a bit of unease with doing that. The other route, the one … the all Alaska route, had the … had a lot of benefits, including all the jobs to Alaska and so forth. It had the downside in that it was going to have to travel across a huge amount of lands that were claimed by different Native entities. And although, at first, the Natives kind of went along with it, or at least didn’t raise huge Cain, before they ever put the first pipe in the ground, the Natives had filed over two hundred lawsuits that threatened to stop the oil pipeline, no matter what the Congress did, for years and years; make it even extraordinarily uncertain, or even stop it -- period. And so that pushed the Natives finally over the full edge. They formed the Alaska Federation of Natives. They organized, and they started learning how to get along together. And as they did, they became a stronger and stronger entity among themselves.
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So, that’s the kind of pressure that eventually came to bear in passing the Alaska Native Claims Act.
Meanwhile, let’s go back and take a quick look at the Statehood Act, because in my … in my personal opinion, and I think it … I have … I could give you names of other people that would agree with me, wholeheartedly, the Statehood Act is what tipped and started this whole thing. Yeah, Prudhoe Bay had its role. There’s no question about it. But the Statehood Act, which began implementation in 1959 … by the time this was happening -- in 1962 on Project Chariot, and 1968 on Prudhoe Bay, sometime in between there for the recreation site and some of these other things that pushed the Natives together -- the Statehood Act allowed the state of Alaska to go out and actually select the lands that would be state lands under the Act.
In our entire history, there’s only one other state that had that kind of allowance, and that was Nevada -- only after Nevada had gone back to Congress, after its original Statehood Act, and petitioned them to give them selection rights rather than force them along the line of the traditional statehood act land … land give. Normally in America, from the eight … 1787 Ordinance onward, the states – the new states as they came into the Union, although they were considered on an equal footing with all the other states -- were given, for various purposes but primarily for roads and schools … the development of roads and schools within their territories … were given two sections of land -- Section 16 and 36 of every township. Wherever Section 16 and Section 36 fell; if it fell in the middle of a lake -- that’s what they got. If it fell on the top of a mountain -- that’s what they got. If it was in a dry gully -- that’s what they got. And that was the way it went.
As we moved to the West, and got into the really arid states, they did get magnanimous in the federal government and up in Congress, and they started giving first three, and then ultimately, four sections. So some states, like Arizona, got Section 16 and 36 and Section 32 and … I can’t … I think it [was] 22, but I can’t remember it for sure. But four sections. Under any of those scenarios -- four sections [was] the ultimate. Alaska would have been eligible for about 42 million acres of land.
But, no. That’s not what Alaska got. Alaska got 102 and a half million acres selection rights, without ever asking for it. When Nevada asked for it, they had to give back half of their total in order to get pre-selection. So, whatever Nevada’s was -- it was about 3 million acres -- they had to give back about 1 and a half, and they got one and a half of selection rights.
Selection rights were a biggie.
And so, Alaska got 102.5. Plus they already had about a million - slightly over a million - acres of various lands that had been transferred to private ownership, community ownership, etc., over the course of time. And they were given an additional 800 thousand acres -- 400 thousand out of the forests - national forests,
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and 400 thousand out of the BLM, for community enlargement. When you added it all up, Alaska - at statehood - got over 104.6 million acres.
That’s bigger than the state of California – entirely. So, it was a very generous grant.
But that isn’t where it stopped. There were -- and I won’t go into them -- but there were, literally, an entire page full of special provisions. Including the provision that allows Alaska to get 90% of the rents and royalties from all federal oil and gas leases. Which is a big deal. And it saved the state of Alaska, at one point in time, they’d become somewhat arrogant with it, and the Congress has … has cut it back in petroleum reserves, when they opened the petroleum reserve. But, it’s still a big deal.
And it … the rational that was used was that Alaska was not a ‘reclamation state’, there weren’t going to be any Bureau of Reclamation dams in the state of Alaska. And in the … throughout the other 49 states, the funding from oil federal land and gas royalties, I don’t remember the numbers any more, but some percentage of that - about 37 and a half percent or something, go into the Reclamation Fund, which goes into creating reservoirs, dams, and so forth, for irrigation districts out across the West. And Alaska wasn’t going to get that, so they took that 37 and a half percent and gave it to them in money, directly out of the oil and gas rents and royalties. Which is … it could be extraordinarily sizable. They also allowed them to select lands that had potential -- high potential for oil and gas. Other states weren’t allowed to do that. States were not allowed to go into a known geological structure and select lands -- because they didn’t have land selections, to begin with. I think if their lands happened to fall there they got it, but there was no other way for a state to actually go in and … and take on federal oil and gas. That was kept for all the people of the nation. Except in Alaska. And there was other provisions. Alaska just got one monstrous bunch of benefits.
But there were some caveats in that original Act, and a couple of them have been very important to us, so I will mention them. They had what they called the PYK line, which is … which stands for Porcupine / Yukon / Kuskokwim line, which starts right here, flows down Porcupine River, hits the Yukon River on the north side - ten miles north of the river, follows it all the way down here - to the 161st meridian approximately, cuts across to the Kuskokwim River, goes out to the Bay, cuts directly into Bristol Bay to about here, then cuts directly back east across the Alaska peninsula, and then goes southward -- into oblivion, I guess. And, all of the lands to the north and west of that line, in the Statehood Act, required that the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Interior approve any land selections by the state of Alaska.
Now, I can imagine what it did to the Alaskans ego to have that happen to them, but then here they were getting all 104.6 and blahdy blah and blahdy blah. So, I’m sure that they screamed and yelled and kicked and did whatever they did. This was our national defense purposes … protection, so that the military, if they wanted a piece
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of property within that area, they’d be able to make exclusive federal withdrawals, and put in military bases or whatever, and they wouldn’t have to worry about conflicting with the state. Ultimately, the state agreed with to PYK line. But it was still very awkward for them. And you note that the whole North Slope was in the PYK line.
Nonetheless, everybody knew that there was high potential for oil up here on the North Slope, and that was why, since 1962, up … in fact before 1962, in 1942, at the beginning of WWII, the … the entire Petroleum Reserve -- they called it Pet - 4 NR [Naval Petroleum Reserve #4] in the first … We had a series of petroleum reserves in a … in the United States, and PET - 4 is a 23 million acre area right up here, on the North Slope. And the reason we had that is because some of the Eskimos in the area had pointed out for the white people that came up there, seeps on the surface of the soil in several places, where you had actual petroleum product coming up and seeping out of the ground. And in 1923 … wasn’t Calvin Coolidge, it was that other president back in ’23, that set the whole reserve aside for possible use by the Navy, because we were converting our Navy from coal to oil, and this was going to be a potential reserve for the future. So all of that was over there, and was unavailable to the state. But, there was this other area, and they … they went ahead and had a tentative lease and exploration going on, which lead to the 1968 discovery.
But all of that pressure also meant that they were out here selecting lands -- particularly in and around Anchorage, and down on the Kenai Peninsula, and then some other areas -- which were removing lands that the Natives had used for generations -- and had used them for everything from their subsistence gathering / hunting / fishing and so forth, to just travel / transportation / interplay between villages. And they were being cut off by all of this state land selection. And they just felt the pressure of a vice sort of coming around them in all these places. So, very much so, the Statehood Act had caused unrest in the Native community. The feeling that if things kept going, there wasn’t going to be anything available for them, and they wouldn’t ever get their claims, and blahdy blahdy blahdy blah. All of that helped, very strongly, to lead toward this ‘federation of Natives.’ So, with those two things happening, the pressure on the Congress to do something about the oil transportation system -- the pipeline as it turned out to be -- which the Congress immediately wanted to do until they found out that it wasn’t going to be that simple. There was a petition filed for a pipeline, I think in … 1969, in July 1969, so it was just about a year after the discovery well was drilled. But it couldn’t go anywhere because, by that time, the Natives were very upset, and they had been filing lawsuits everywhere they could.
There was one other set of actions that are very important here. Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under President Kennedy and President Johnson, was quite sympathetic toward the aboriginal land claims. And very concerned that all of this stuff was happening, and it was removing options for the Congress to come up with a logical settlement for the Natives. So, beginning in 1966, when the state started to lay down a large block of land selections throughout the state, Udall balked. And
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… and he had some support up on the Hill. And he put on what was known as the ‘land freeze.’ Now, of course, in 1966 his authority to put a land freeze, of any wide magnitude and any great duration, was extremely limited. You didn’t have the BLM Organic Act. You didn’t have a lot of other tools that, today, we look back and think nothing about. But, when he did that, it was … it was … he had some limited limitations on his authority. So, he did it in 1966. But then he had to keep renewing it. He had to keep finding other avenues, other pieces of BLM law, some of it very antiquated, to try to continue keeping the state from asking for land transfers and making new selections and so on. And … but this was irritating, as you might imagine, to the state -- quite irritating to the state, and some of its friends in Congress.
So there … there were … by the time that the Native Claims legislation actually got started, there was both a great reluctance on the part of many of the key senators, and of course the state of Alaska, and a lot of other people, that said, ‘well, you know, if the Natives need a few million dollars, give it to them, but then let’s move on.’ Well, the Natives didn’t want a few million dollars. They wanted land. So they started fighting for it, and especially in 1969. And it got more and more and more; and there were huge pressures brought to bear. And I had one resource that … that gives a very good account of all that, and that’s this book by Mary Clay Berry, which was very well researched, called Alaska Pipeline: Politics of Oil and Native Land Claims. And it … and it’s the best source of telling you where all the pressures were and who did what and names all the things and so on.
But it’s very important to understanding how the Claims Act kind of forced its way out this little narrow pipe at the end of this huge, big 48” pipeline. And the … the settlement that they finally got, and the one that we had to deal with, was 44 million acres of land -- when you add everything together. The actual Act says 40 million acres, but the Act also recognizes that they could take their previous reservations, which was 4 million acres of land. And then there were a whole series of strictures and allocations. So you had about 22 million acres going to the village corporations, which they … they positively had to incorporate. They could go non-profit or they could go for profit, but they had to become corporations, which was a thing the Natives had a hard time coping with, mentally. And then they had the regional corporations, which some people insisted would form the economic mechanism … that after the actual money that was given to them -- 967.5 million dollars or somewhere thereabouts, in the Act -- part of it coming from the state and part – most - of it coming the Feds -- after that was allocated, then they … there needed to be both mechanisms for investing that wisely - not just handing it out to individuals, but then also they had to have ongoing economic viabilities.
So they’re hoping that these regional corporations would become strong, economic bases -- similar to the corporate structure outside. With limitations – they … they couldn’t sell their shares and they had to operate within the guidelines of their … their members were in fact, the enrolled Natives from within certain identified geographic areas. The Natives themselves got 100 shares of stock for each person that was alive on the day of the passage of … or born on that day, you know, the 9
passage of the Act … which was December 18, 1971. And that was to be the shareholders. It didn’t deal with any Native born after that date, so they’ve had to … they’ve had to figure out a way to deal with the newer Natives.
But, in any event, they got 100 shares of stock in their village corporation … that they decided to enroll to, and 100 shares of stock in the regional corporation. If you were a family man and you had a wife and five children, you got 700 [phone ringing] shares of stock – altogether - you know, each member of your family, [phone ringing] in that persons name, got these … these shares of stock. Well, they didn’t know what do with these shares of stock, and they could vote them the same way normal corporate structure, which is very arcane and very complicated. And man, they didn’t learn any of that for a while. All of that had to be learned. And they had all that pushed on them.
So the Claims Act, at the same time it gave them what looks like a tremendous lot in benefits -- certainly no other Native tribal entity in America got that kind of deal. I mean, even the Navaho Reservation, as huge as it is … is … is not like what this thing did. But still, there were all of these arcane provisions. And even when I got involved in 1972, and started talking with Native representatives that were coming in and talking to us on various matters right from the start of my details, it was apparent to me that they didn’t even know, really, what land area meant in boundaries, and what package of rights and benefits went with land, and what package of responsibilities. And things like the easements -- there were requirements in the Act that called upon the Department of Interior to … to decide which public easements must be placed on the Native lands, so that people could actually plan on crossing the Native land. Because they … some of these places … otherwise, it would stop all traffic at certain points, and they could put toll bridges or whatever. So … they … those were arcane principals that the Natives, clearly, did not understand at the time.
So that … responsibilities that rested with the Natives were awesome, in and of themselves; to learn all of these things. And they were given the charge to enroll, decide which village they wanted to become a member of. Enroll, get all that signed up. Then they had to join together, make land selections for their village. Make land selections for their regions. The regions … the regions got the subsurface lands under every village selection. So if the village selected there, the region got the subsurface land. The villages got no subsurface land. So they’ve got that problem of … of split estate. And it’s caused some serious rubs since then.
The regions also got, under the formula, a certain amount of surface and subsurface land, some of it being dictated in the … in the law, where they used, as we typically did, they used a checkerboarding.
And I might go to the maps for just a little bit of time, here, but … The concept of checkerboarding goes way, way back. And it’s caused problems for America, as far as I know. A … although it’s … it’s had some side benefits, I suspect, but it certainly … The first major use of checkerboarding that got everybody’s attention was when 10
we … when we gave land to the railroads, to build railroads from the eastern transportation systems, about the Mississippi River, to our west coast. And there wasn’t any money to do the job, and so we couldn’t give them monetary incentives. And so they gave five major railroad corporations these huge land grants, on a checkerboard basis, along their rights of way, for 30 miles on either side -- which is a huge swath of land, gigantic amounts of land, in checkerboard fashion, on every checkerboarded section, alternating. And they were … they ultimately sold those. They … there were land schemes; there was all kinds of things that went on.
And all the evils of checkerboarding were known from that time -- which was in the 1850s, forward. So we knew that there were evils of checkerboarding, but they went ahead and used … and used checkerboarding.
So, let me take a map or two off of here [lots of paper / map noise] and go through them just a little bit. And then put that behind you on the case. [Lots of paper / map noise] Um … I won’t stay up here too long, but this is essentially what Alaska looked like in 1954. Almost no transportation structure, and what transportation structure there was, was all centered in … in this area. The red lines are … are roads and the rest of Alaska consisted of all these little red airplanes. The little red airplane figure says there is some kind of an air … field … runway, in all of those places.
And, as I said, there about 220 bush villages. There are 220 listed in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and so there are approximately 220 of these little red airplanes on this map. Ok? And they … they’re all over the place. Now, some of those little airplanes mean that there’s about ... a one thousand foot airstrip is what it is, and if you’ve got a Super Cub you can land on it. Otherwise, you’d better not try it. But, nevertheless, that was the basic infrastructure of Alaska, as we typically look at a … at a territory or state in 1954.
[Lots of paper / map noise]
Yeah. That’s not gonna work quite as well because the map’s smaller, but this is the … this is the state of conditions in 1971 September, which was just immediately before they passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. So this is what the state land ownership and pattern looked like.
Let me explain a little bit. Here’s the Naval Petroleum Reserve #4 [Pet-4 Nr] I mentioned -- about 23 million acres. Here’s the area across the center of the … had been tentatively … it was not patented to the state, but it had been tentatively approved to the state of Alaska. Here’s our Arctic National Wildlife Range, which was 8.2 million acres, I believe it was. Then these check … these cross hatched areas here and here, and I … and the two yellow areas are BLM lands that were under the classification of Multiple Use Act of 1960 … had been placed … ’62, I guess it was … had been placed into … these were pending classification and these were classified under that Act, which put them into a special category.
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This was the other impinging project that I forgot to mention. I meant to. I couldn’t come up with it when I was talking, but the Rampart Canyon Dam. Ten and one half thousand acres -- 10,500 acres -- of … of inundation; would have covered up 6 villages, lived in by 4000 / 5000 Natives; would have generated a huge amount of electricity, for 100,000 / 200,000 people. But they didn’t need that much of electricity, so what were they going to do with it? The Fish & Wildlife Service took a very, very strong position against that. But that all occurred in the … in the 1960s, again. And was another project that scared the Natives, for sure. I mean, that somebody could just come in and flood their homeland -- as it would. It would flood the entire homeland that … two Gwich’in subtracts, up here in the Fort Yukon area and down to Stevens Village. So Rampart was a big deal.
Rampart also meant that this land was classified in a certain fashion at the time that the Native Claims Settlement Act passed, which put it special … into a special category, which is why I mention it. Then these other kind of browns and taupes are … are state selections. The greens are various kind of parks; and here’s Kenai National Moose Range; and here’s the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge; and Katmai; Mt. McKinley; Glacier Bay. And here’s the southeastern forest -- the largest national forest in the system at … well, even today, it’s over … it’s about 16 million acres. And then, of course, the Aleutian chain, which starts right here, below Izembek, and runs all the way out to the far end of the Aleutian chain -- a 1000 miles -- which was set aside in 1913 as the Aleutian Islands National Wildlife [Refuge].
So that’s about what the state looked like. Here is the corridor that was hypothesized in 1969, after the permit application came in. And, you can see, it courses through an awful lot of lands. And there were Native villages all up and down along there. And … and so, there was going to be a real struggle. But this is the conditions of things just before the Native Claims Act passed.
[Lots of paper / map noise]
You know, even though this thing is dated up here – 1971 October -- I think it was later than that.
But this shows some of representations of the initial identification of areas of interest. In this particular case, it was the National Park [Service] areas of interest. And so fairly early on, you can see that they were interested in some area here, and … and Skagway, of course, this was a … an historic park where the … where the main gold rush happened; and here was the Wrangle-St. Elias; and additions to Katmai; additions to McKinley; there’s the big Brooks Range; and Lake Clark. So these were their initial identifications. There was a similar map for the Fish & Wildlife Service. And I don’t know whether I’ve actually got it. I think our legs giving out on us over there.
[Lots of paper / map noise]
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Ok. This one’s harder to see, I know, but this one shows the combined Fish & Wildlife Service interest areas and Park Service interest areas. So I … I’ll point to some … here was a major Fish & Wildlife Service interest area which was associated with the Artic Range extensions. And then of course the … the huge Gates of the Artic; the Kobuk Sand Dunes, and Kobuk area in general; the Seward Peninsula; the Yukon Delta; interior basins -- which were extremely important for water fowl; the Lake Iliamna / Lake Clark areas -- which are … a huge recreational draw, is what it boils down to. And then the south side of the Alaska Peninsula, which became an interest area for the Fish & Wildlife Service; the Togiak region for Fish & Wildlife Service; St. Lawrence Island was a Fish & Wildlife Service interest area, but it turned out to be a previous Native reservation. So again, you’re … you’re starting to see how … and here’s the Lake Clark Park proposal. And there were already starts at identifying island groups that the Fish & Wildlife Service was interested in -- from colonial nesting birds and … and certain water fowl.
[Lots of paper / map noise]
I think that’s probably the same thing with the titles of them over here and the areas are numbered. So, it’s just a … probably something a little bit better to be seen (-?-) by the video, but it’s essentially the same thing.
NO – You’re starting to see places like Yukon Flats, Koyukuk, Innoko and …
BR – Yeah this is Yukon Flats. And here’s Kanuti; here’s Nowitna; and this is Innoko. This is Nowitna, Koyukuk, Selawick, the north side of this … of the Seward’s Peninsula, the huge Yukon Flats, and then this whole region here - were all Fish & Wildlife Service interest areas -- plus extensions to the Kenai Moose Range. [Lots of paper / map noise] These maps, by the way, were used in the initial briefings that were being prepared. These are some of the things I worked on when I first went in … on detail, as information was coming in from Anchorage …and then, we at … we were responsible for taking it up to the policy makers. But shortly after the act passed … the act passed in December of ’71 … and January 15th of ’72, the Secretary of Interior at the time, which was Rodger C. B. Morton, established a task force, an Alaskan Task Force, of all these policy people that he wanted involved -- both in implementing the Act and in making policy decisions as related to the Act. The other thing that the Act did, that I didn’t mention, which is important, is it … in Section 17 … which contains the language for doing all the studies, and it also contains the authority, and the language for the authorities, to withdraw huge amounts of lands, which we’ll talk about very shortly. But in addition to that, it created a Federal / State Land Use Planning Commission for Alaska -- which was to be a temporary body of the combined federal / state, to stand off, just a little bit to the side of the Interior Department, and act as an advisor.
And so this … this body, which spent an awful lot of money, and had at one time a huge staff, because they were given the … the option of taking people out of the agencies - with the agencies continuing to pay for them, and work as staff to the … to the planning commission. And the planning commission was a board of about 8
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or 10 people that were selected by either the federal side or the state side. And they became an interesting adjunct factor in the whole panoply of movement. They didn’t really have any responsibilities per se. They were given some broad charges in the Act, and so they could, within those charges, sort of do whatever they wanted to. And they developed a huge amount of materials; put out a whole bunch of publications. They did some very worthwhile things in terms of inventorying and accessing lands. But they also came up with a fifth system concept of a cooperative land system. Ultimately, that would have been under the charge of a continuing Land Use Planning Commission. So it was also a … a self perpetuating body.
Ok. This is January 72, so this is just as the Act passed. And there is … there is some differences in what you’ve seen before, although a lot of them are subtle. The state had laid in some more land selections, and so they had put in a whole bunch … these were just selections, they hadn’t moved anywhere through the process. But, in spite … in spite of Udall’s land freeze … Udall’s land freeze did keep them out until the Act passed. But, it gets a little bit complicated. The … the state of Alaska, in its Statehood Act, has a provision that … that there’s a delay for any major federal land withdrawal to take place. There’s a little bit of a lag and a delay that … that goes into place, to give them time to react to it and so forth. ‘Cause they had always been worried about these instant land withdrawals by the federal agencies. And there were quite a few, I mean, I can … I can point out that in … as early as 1908, the federal government withdrew about 15 million acres on the Yukon Delta, by Teddy … and Teddy Roosevelt signed the paper that created the first big, huge, bird reservation up there. The state eventually bad mouthed that thing and threatened all kinds of things. And so, in 1921, they un-made it and dissolved it. And we put it back together, and extended it a little bit.
But, in the meantime, Nunivak Island was reserved, the Aleutian Islands were reserved, other places … other islands were reserved in Alaska; and some areas other than that. And both the state and the Natives were a little bit sensitive about that. But, when the Congress passed the Native Claims law, all these little red squares that you see here with … you can’t see it probably, but they have red square-ish like lines around them. These are … these are withdrawals that were made in the Act. These are the village selection withdrawals. And so here’s the core township - the red square is 23,040 acres in size - that little square - and then there are two tiers of townships surrounding it … circumference around it. And within those two tiers of townships, there was to be a checkerboarding by the villages and the regional corporations, for their primary land selections.
Now, if they couldn’t get enough lands to satisfy their particular eligibility, then there were to be other areas withdrawn, under other authority, as close to these lands as you could get it, on public lands, and from which they would take selections. And those areas were called ‘in lieu’ selection areas. And they had … they had to be three times the amount of land that was … that was ultimately going to be selected, so that the Natives would have a choice. They didn’t want to just have the government decide, ‘ok, here it is, here’s what you’re gonna get.’ So they gave them three times the amount of land, and they could go in there and select.
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What that obviously meant was there was going to be a huge amount of land tied up for Native selections that might – would, in fact, would - not just might - would -- go back to the federal government, or be made available for state selection, or whatever. So there was … that led to a lot of politics, I might … I might say. So, what you’ve got here is that plus these red lines which demark the regional corporation’s boundaries. There were 12 regional corporations in the state of Alaska, and the allowance for a 13th region, which was at the choice of all the people that lived out of Alaska but were eligible Alaska Natives that wanted to incorporate into a 13th region. One of the other big deals about the Native Claims Settlement Act, which has come into play over and over and over again, were provisions that … that tried to work out some kind of a resolution between the haves and have-nots.
Everybody knew that there were certain of these regions that were going to be far wealthier than other regions. For instance, the North Slope Natives were … were setting up here with this potential oil and gas basin here, and potential oil and gas here. Whereas the Yukon Delta -- which was a very low quality, secondary basin for oil and gas, and where there’s over one third of the Natives of the state live, out here, in 55 villages -- they were probably … they couldn’t even find a Korean company that was interested in coming and making toothpicks out of their black spruce. Their economic possibilities were just pretty minimal, is what I’m saying. So they knew that when they … when they settled the Act.
And so what they … what they tried to do in the law, was to figure out mechanisms where there would be kind of a sharing arrangement. So one of the things that’s required in the law is that when a corporation - regional corporation - develops its land resources, 70% of what they get from that is shared among all the other regions and only 30% comes to the home region. And boy, that has caused some interesting stuff.
There’s also sharing between allocations; between the regional corporations and the village corporations. The money comes through the regional corporations, so they actually get it, and then they allocate it down, according to what the law says. The idea was they wanted to give some amount of money - direct benefit - to the individual Natives, because they do live in … in pretty severe poverty, according to our standards. I’m not sure they’ve necessarily felt that poverty entirely. But … but anytime somebody comes with a greenback, you’ll probably take it. So they wanted some money to go down, but they didn’t want to burn up the whole 967.5 million. So they had a filtering system there, with some of the money to be invested and some of it to go on down. All that is played out under what you see here.
The other main thing that you see here is that the … this was considered a very important area both in oil and gas standpoint, and then also, its relationship to the Bearing Sea, which is also believed to be a major oil and gas basin. And so this is where the facilities would be probably be sited. And for that reason the … the state laid a whole bunch of selections down there at a very early date.
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NO – We’re down to one minute on this first cassette.
BR – Ok. Well, I’ll end it by saying, in January, right after the Act passed, the state tried to lay down 42 million acres of land selections. And they said they were eligible to do that because this 90 day freeze that the Act put on them had to have a delay. The DOI, of course, argued against that. And it was eventually settled in 1972. But it was settled only because the Department didn’t want the state just blowing this whole thing out of the water for years and years as we went through a lawsuit. Not because there was any chance that they were actually going to win it. But they did end up giving them some of the selections that they asked for, and that’s what you see … that’s why you see some of these new areas show up. Ok?
NO – Ok.
End of Tape #1, first set of tapes.
[Although the interview on the second set of tapes is identical for the most part to the first set, there is a small amount of conversation on the tail end of second set of tapes that is additional to what was on the first set. It is included here. This conversation blends into the start of Tape #2 of the first set.]
BR – How is that going? Is that the sort of thing you want?
NO – Exactly! It’s perfect.
?? – Well, we can keep doing that. You’ve got …
NO – Oh, yeah. No, this is … this is exactly what I was hoping for, so … and you know it much better than anyone else here, that’s …
[indecipherable, far off conversation, map noise]
BR – I know that I’m jumping past some of my stuff and then having to come back and try to pick it up. I’ll … I think I’ve got … au … I missed the 900 million dollars. Ok. Well, we’ve actually changed the maps since … since the moment ago, but this then is a March 1972 map …
Start of Tape 2, first set of tapes. End of DVD #1
BR – … which shows one of the things that the Secretary was able to do. As I said, everybody seemed to hit the ground running. The Natives probably had the worst of it, because they didn’t really understand a lot of the things that they had to do.
But state certainly hit the ground running. They had been monitoring all their stuff, and they wanted a whole bunch of things. And so, in January of ‘72, they laid down
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a whole bunch of selections. And … and the … of course the Secretary refused them. But then the state turned right around and went into court and filed a lawsuit. And the only problem with the lawsuit … I was … I was in there and all the conversations and the discussions and the analyses that went on. And there was almost no way that the state was going to prevail in a court of law. The … the Act was clear. The mandate from the Congress, the power of the Congress to do what it did, all of those things were extremely clear. And there was a 90 day freeze placed on all the lands in Alaska -- by the Congress. It was an extension of the … of the Udall land freeze -- the last one he put in place in 1969, which said that there won’t be an oil transportation system until the Native Claims Act gets done. And tried to freeze it at just the … the state selections at that time, which were … oh, somewhere less than 20 million acres. I think it was somewhere around 16 to 20 million acres, at the time that the Statehood Act … I mean, the Claims Act passed. Then they came in with [End of Tape #1, second set of tapes.] 42 million acres of selections and were demanding that, or they were going to stop the whole thing.
And so, in the settlement that came out and it took from … they filed their lawsuit, I think, in April of ‘72, and it took ‘till September to work out an agreement. But the agreement that they worked out took them out of … of some of the national interest areas that were going to be studied for parks and refuges. It took them out of many of the Native areas that they were to be in conflict. And it allowed them in to some areas that they wanted very badly. So, you see on this map some new state areas in blue.
And there three shades of blue. There’s the dark blue, which is ‘patented’ land. There’s the intermediate blue, which is ‘Tentatively Approved,’ which is one step of movement by the federal government, which accepts the state land selection, goes through and makes a preliminary check of the records and files, at the Bureau of Land Management, and determines that there’s only conflict with other land selection rights and so forth, in these specified areas, and therefore moves this into a category waiting only for the state to say ‘we want you to patent that block of lands right there.’ That’s … and to make a final determination about conflicts with other entries. So TA lands – ‘Tentatively Approved’ - are believed to be at a stage where the state can actually take certain actions.
For instance, these were ‘Tentatively Approved’ lands at the time of the oil well was discovered, and that … the leasing that went on right after the oil well … there was a huge lease sale, that uses all these dark blue lands up here, in 1969, in which the state … and here’s a state that its total state product - net state product, or gross state product – actually, I think it was the gross state product, for 1968 - was 1.2 billion dollars. In January of 1969, they had a lease sale on the North Slope - up here - that brought in 900 million dollars -- in cash.
You can imagine what some of the Alaskans were feeling about that moment in time. So … but those were only ‘Tentatively Approved.’ And so there could have been a challenge against whether ‘Tentatively Approved’ was good enough for them to do all that or whether there was some kind of a residual federal ownership or
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national interest or whatever. So they wanted that patented to them. And that’s why it went to patent, because of that filing, and the selec… and the settlement. And some of these other lands that they wanted, particularly down in this area, again, were areas that were either of interest for them from an economic oil and gas / fisheries / port siteing / on shore support facilities, things of that nature, around the state. And … and they could have complicated … again, the lawsuit that they filed could have meant that the entire Native Claims Act had to be delayed for 2 to 4 years. Well, you know, that just wasn’t going to work. So the Secretary settled with the state of Alaska.
Also by this … by this … all these action that were going on, it was decided that the Secretary had better move quicker, rather than waiting and doing it slower. In the law, he was supposed to take up to 9 months before he needed to identify and withdraw the so called 17 D2 lands, which was shortened in everybody’s lexicon to ‘D2.’ So when anybody says ‘D2’ in Alaska they all know what it means, but what it refers to is Section 17 (d) (2) of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. And he had until September 18th of 1972 to make his decisions, based on what the agencies were bringing forward, and based on policy decisions. And then make the … the withdrawals. And then the studies could get underway.
And they had … they had a fairly short time to make the studies, but they had to make recommendations by January 18, 1973. So it was a fairly short time frame. And it covered a huge amount of land -- 80 million acres is no small chunk of land. But what the Secretary did was, on March 9th 1972, right after … right before, actually, but the effect … effective date was the publication date in the Federal Register which was March 20th I think … it was 19th or 20th … ok, so it was like … one day after the freeze was over by the Act, he put a land withdrawal down on 80 million acres of D2 lands, 47.5 million acres of D1 lands, and withdrew all the Native deficiency lands, which was another 45 million acres. So he actually withdrew, in March - he signed the orders on the 9th, and it was published in the Federal Register, as I said, one day after the freeze - on about 160 / 170 million acres around the state of Alaska, which just about blew the state … state away.
But, it gave the Natives the initial deficiency areas identified for them. It gave them an opportunity to discuss that with the Secretary. And there will be adjustments that you’ll see when he makes his final adjustments in September. And it … it meant that the state was gonna have to come to terms with all of that. So, there will be changes, even though, technically, if you read the Act, there shouldn’t have been all of this adjustment going on. But the various pushing, shoving, and so forth, was inevitable I think. And in the milieu of all of that, here you have the staffs, very small staffs I think … it by … by this time, in Anchorage, you had about 4 people in the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife Area Office working, somewhat ad hock, under the Refuge Supervisor.
NO – Would that have included Clay … Clay Hardy?
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BR – This would have included Clay Hardy. Clay was up there, and had been involved in things like the Amchitka atomic bomb test. And they had people from the wilderness staff -- Marv Plenert, who was up there … and a couple of other people. And then they had people like Dr. Calvin Lensink, who was actually the Refuge Manager at the Clarence Rhode National Wildlife Refuge. And they had Jim King, who was the waterfowl biologist, pilot / biologist for the state … for the Bureau, and had flown all the waterfowl surveys throughout the state. And these were the kinds of people that they had pulled together to identify interest areas and to put the basic, raw, resource information into … into packets.
And so, I mentioned that, by January, we had one packet that was about 160 pages. And that was turned into another packet in July. And then it was turned into a third packet by September. So there were three major efforts, each one of them upgrading the information and honing it down a little bit, in preparation for taking the next step.
‘Cause the other thing that had happened … external force that had happened along the way, was in 1969 … in the latter part of 1969, the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA] passed. We’d never had the National Environmental Policy Act before that.
And the National Environmental Policy Act caught a couple of very important projects. And one of them it caught was the pipeline. ‘Cause the pipeline was asked … they asked for the right of way in July of 1969. Then the Act passed shortly thereafter, and they didn’t want to have to do what was, you know, an EIS. And nobody knew what that was at the time. But they didn’t want to have to do that. They thought they could get around it.
And the first trial they … they did an 8 page document that they called an environmental impact statement and … and I don’t think it was that precise document, I think it was the next document after that one was rejected - sort of out of hand, then they went back and did another quick and dirty document. And that was taken to court by the Wilderness Society, by one Mister Harry Crandell, whose name I mentioned to you.
Harry Crandell -- I’ll just briefly give you a bio on him. Harry Crandell … at the time Larry Means went to Washington and the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife into the Branch of Planning, Harry Crandell was the Chief of the Branch of Planning for the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. Harry Crandell got very upset with events in 1969, inside the Bureau. Specifically, for the record, he was upset by the way Director John Gottschalk was treated and ousted from his Directorship, and moved aside, and Spencer Smith was put in as Director. And Harry just thought that was an outrage. And he quit. And he went to the Wilderness Society and started working on public land issues at the Wilderness Society. And then shortly thereafter, in the early ‘70s, right about the time this passed … the Native Claims Act passed … he went up to the Hill. And worked on first, the Public Lands Committee at the House under Chairman Melcher, and then, when Chairman Udall
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put together his oversight and Alaska Lands Subcommittee, he brought Harry on as his Staff Director.
So here is an ex-Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, ex-Refuge Manager, ex-planner, very involved with … and understanding of the Bureaus affairs, setting up there as the Chief of Staff on this important committee.
Now, of course, there’s also a jurisdictional thing to take consideration of, because it comes to play over and over again. And that is: the Interior Committee doesn’t have jurisdiction over the National Wildlife Refuge System or the Fish & Wildlife Service. Merchant Marine and Fisheries [does], specifically the Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation … and John Dingle.
And John Dingle was involved in the Native Claims Act, and in the provisions in the Native Claims Act. Specifically, the provisions in the miscellaneous section that protected refuges, that only allowed the Natives that were within or near a refuge to take up to three townships out of that refuge.
In the parks you couldn’t take any land out -- no matter what. But in the refuges, originally they were going to be able to take whatever they wanted to. State lands -- they were going to be able to take whatever they wanted to. Both of those two land categories, in the final Native Claims Act, were modified so that in the case, as I said, the Native villages in or right adjacent existing national wildlife refuges, depending on population, could take up to three townships of land out of that national wildlife refuge. And the same thing was true about the state. They couldn’t take it out of patented land, but out of TAed land, or just selected land, they could take three townships - out of Native lan… state lands. And in the case of the refuges, one of the provisions – again, John Dingle - whatever they took out was to be replaced.
And so there was a provision in Section 22E that said that all lands removed from a national wildlife refuge had to be replaced. And so we were also trying to identify what they called 22E replacement lands through this process. And I’ll point them out in a minute. Which was a very unusual thing, and … and it actually brought down a lot of animosity, both within the Interior Department -- other agencies -- and in Natives and in some other places, both in limitation and replacement provision. The Forest Service lost land, but they didn’t have a replacement provision, for instance. So they were a little bit upset about that. But, all of these laws, the Statehood Act, the Native Claims Act, the resulting Act, these were all compromise situations, and there are provisions in there that you have to wonder sometimes, where did this come from and why. But in this case, I can tell you the where it came from and the why. John Dingle was protecting his turf and his national wildlife refuges, which he feels very, very covetous of, even today, at his advanced age.
So, there were these kinds of things. And when the … when the bells started moving, and the Congress started getting involved, Dingle made sure he got his oar in the water. In 1972, while this was going on, John Dingle introduced the first bill
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making refuges all over the state of Alaska -- big huge swaths of areas. Very few people know about, but he had a bill that he put in. He called it a … the National Wildlife Refuge Act, that included these giant areas in Alaska. And that Act also had an organic provision for the whole refuge system, that moved the refuge system out of the Fish & Wildlife Service and set it all up in a different configuration than what you know of to be today. So Dingle was playing … playing games. And I can also say that Harry B. Crandell, this little guy that came out of the planning division and went to the Wilderness Society and then went up on the Hill, wrote that law for … for John Dingle. That’s how it got to be so knowledgeable. And … and Harry had certain ideas about what ought to happen to the refuge system. And he convinced John Dingle that it ought to happen, and so he helped write that provision, too.
NO – That’s really interesting to know, because, you know, you look at things today, and everything starts with Udall and HR 39, and that’s … no references have I ever seen to this.
BR – Yeah. Nah. There were … there were a number of laws … bills, not laws … number of bills put in, and Dingle just happened to get out there first. He wanted to make sure that everybody understood he had jurisdiction over the refuges. So we had … and we had full knowledge of that. I can tell you that we were constantly reminded, ‘cause I would get calls from the Merchant Marine and Fisheries staff all the time. Larry would get calls, and so on. And … and they were … they were maintaining that they were going to fight for jurisdiction. And it ultimately became a fight.
Ok. So, the … the idea was that wherever we had these little red dots next to units like Clarence Rhode … and that there were 13 villages that were eligible to select lands from within the Clarence Rhode National Refuge alone. So, 13 times 3 is 39 townships, times 22 … 22 … 22 thousand … 23 thousand and 40 acres, is a lot of land, to be taken out of these refuges.
The very dark green, which is darker even than this, which is the D2 land, the darkest green here that you see, are areas that we identified that were to be considered for replacement of 1.8 million acres that was going to be lost to the refuge system to village corporations under the Act. So that was a provision that very few people know about because, the way the thing finally cranked out, ultimately, the 22E lands became somewhat moot. They became very moot. But … we … we … we fought for them. And we did a whole lot of work over the years putting out regulations, and making land withdrawals, and doing all kinds of things.
So the darker green is the D2 lands. That should be similar to those interest areas that I mentioned on the other map.
And then the light green are the so called D1 public interest areas. The light green are … are actually quite well protected … in … in the sense that they … in both the case of the D1 lands and the D2 lands, they were using brand new authority that was granted in the Alaskan Native Claims Act. It was authority that the Secretary
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never had before. And … and it gave them many unusual features. I don’t think I need to go into them particularly, but the D2 lands were timed, that was one thing. The D1 were going to be indefinite. In fact, there are still lands all over Alaska that are underlaying federal lands that had a D1 land withdrawal protective mechanism laying in there somewhere like a … like a film of a … of a … of Mylar on top of the land.
The … these withdrawal areas that were pink and white were using authority … the white particularly, are authorities that were in the Bill. Those were general public land laws, and they used those authorities. So they have a slightly different nature to them. Although, I believe that the Secretary put D1 land withdrawals under every one of them in March of … of a … of a 1972. So there’s even a layer there.
There’s this theory within the Solicitors Office in Interior that you never know what’s gonna come down the road, so, therefore, whenever you have an opportunity, you don’t just put a single land withdrawal down, you put layers of land withdrawals. And then somebody that wants to get in there and do bad things to you, has got to peel each of these layers away. And each one becomes pretty arduous to do. And it was that kind of thing that eventually saved the … Barrier Islands on the Artic National Wildlife Range, later on.
And then some of the protection that’s been given to the NPRA [Naval Petroleum Reserves Area?], but … it’s very … it’s an important concept, that I never knew anything about before I went in and started working on these things.
Well, back to NEPA. NEPA was … ultimately they … the … the pipeline companies lost. They did … they hadn’t done anything close to what had to be done for an environmental impact statement. And I think they ultimately ended up with a nine volume impact statement. I don’t remember how many pages that was, but it was it started out at eight pages in the first submission, and then it kept growing and growing. And after the court case -- it got huge. And I don’t know how much money they spent on it. But that’s what it took to get the environmental considerations. And all I can say is, having looked at it very, very, very, very closely from inside, contemporaneously, and also looking back on it, I sure am glad that that happened, because when they first started testifying on the pipeline, they were making claims that their engineers knew everything that needed to be known about permafrost, about construction, and … and development, etc. etc., and that there was not going to be any problem.
Well, they claimed, at that time, Norm, that they were going to put this pipeline into the ground. And they were going to bury and insulate this pipeline, except for maybe, about 30 to 40 miles, of the 800 mile corridor. So, if that … that should tell anybody that knows anything about the final product, or anything about permafrost, and the conditions that they had to go through, and the serious nature of some of the things that had to be done, such as earthquake control, all the stream crossings, body and … you know, the caribou access, and so forth, that … they ended up … I doubt if there is 32 miles of buried pipeline -- or much more than that. Because
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they really didn’t know. And if it hadn’t been for the environmental impact statement, where they actually had to go out and deal with experts, and the universities, and outside of universities -- USGS, and some other places, they would have never … I mean, the pipeline would have been a disaster.
In a relative sense, it’s worked fairly well.
It’s getting a little bit scary now, because it’s wearing out.
But … but in terms of what they actually, finally built with all the monitoring and everything that went on … But anybody that believes that the environmentalists and the people, the professional biologists and so forth, were scaremongering, only needs to look at the changes that came about from 1969 / ‘70, when they first went in and testified.
And I have those hearings. And I actually reviewed them the other night, just preparing for this. And, it’s almost scary what they were saying that they knew, and so forth, in those hearings, at that time. So, lot of changes came about.
It also caught us, caught all the agencies. We were going to do these land withdrawals, and we were going to do all these parks and refuges and stuff. But guess what, we had to write environmental impact statements. And … this was early in the game, so, some things got away.
But most of it … even the Rampart Canyon got caught a little bit. It didn’t do a full fledged environmental impact statement, but it put out a huge series of documents that … that revealed, you know, some of the really dire aspects of what would happen if they went ahead and … and put that dam in down here, and flood 10,500 square miles of land, put it under water. And what was gonna happed in there with the 4 foot annual fluctuation and … and so on and so forth. And the devastation on … particularly waterfowl resources, was awesome. But also, all the subsistence resources that this … this is a huge subsistence resource, and as I said, 4000 to 5000 people would have their homes and all of their territory and their identity just … removed from them. So it was a very awesome … very awesome thing.
Well, to get back a little bit more on track. Here we are in March of 1972 … that this withdrawal was laid down right at … the day after the freeze let up. And, again, I think there was … you’ll see through this whole thing, there was a huge effort within the Department of Interior and the agencies that were involved, trying to get this information out -- not only to the Natives, but to the state, and anybody else that was interested. So, even the ‘map on the floor’ gang that was growing out of the … of the coalition of forces in the conservation community, which started with the development of an Alaska Conservation Society. Of … it jelled around this whole event, is what it boiled down to. They didn’t have one before. And they started up because this thing was in the mill. And … and even in … even while we were doing our work, and trying to get ahead of the ballgame, they were up there doing their work. And … and as early as January, the Alaska Conversation Society actually sent
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a team of people – delegation – in to see the Secretary, carrying all this big thick volume of material, saying ‘here’s where you ought to be looking for this Park and here’s where you ought to be looking for that Refuge and this Wild and Scenic River and so on.’
And … and interestingly enough, at least to me, and I … and I’m not going to try to … to second guess, and evaluate the rights and wrongs of it, but, a lot of their sources were, in fact, agency people. Who worked after hours, and on weekends, on their own time, and took their expertise to pour into this Alaska conservation organization, and help them put together another … another pressure point -- another movement if you will -- to try to make this huge, one of a kind, never-before-and-never-again, planning exercise into something as meaningful as we could, so that it was really, truly, based on resource values, rather than pure politics. And I think, you know, I’m not even gonna say that politics didn’t get in here, but I will say there was a huge amount of resource values and resource information and judgments based on that, that fought back and forth and over the table and around the corner, to try to make this thing actually be resource based. And I think we … we won a few victories in that … in that effort.
[Lots of map / paper noise]
So, let’s go to the next map it’s not quite the ‘map on the floor group’ but there was … was just slightly above that in elevation. Now I’ve gone and put it back together ….
[Lots of map / paper noise]
The other nice thing about these maps is, you notice they’ve got a little bit more user friendly in terms of tone and the colors and stuff. That last one was kind of glaring. And now, here, they … they’ve knocked the tones back a little bit. By the way, as an aside, I don’t know how … whether that thing is picking it up or not but it … it sees these little squares and they said there’re 23,040 acres - a township. And if you get a little bit closer, you can see the map is just covered with those little squares. There are 2200 of those little squares inside it - the state of Alaska. And the state of Alaska is a huge piece of … almost a subcontinent unto itself. And if you … if you actually take the state of Alaska, and lay it on top of the United States of America, at the same scale, this area right here would be right off shore of North Carolina … South Carolina, right at … around Savannah and the Savannah River Delta. This area here would be up at International Falls, Minnesota. And this end of the Aleutian Islands, out there, Attu -- where we fought the battle for … in WWII, would be setting right off the edge of California, in Santa Barbara.
So I … I only bring that up, not to brag about the size of the state, ‘cause I don’t … I’ve never lived in that state. But I bring it up because the logistical problems that we encountered, and everybody else encountered … I would say particularly the Natives, because of the lack of resources to do this … but, the travel - and other logistical things that you had to go through - to even try to understand, and then
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cope with, that kind of dimension -- 378 million acres: 3 times the size of California; more than 2 times the size of size of Texas. And you try to deal with that kind of magnitude, in a milieu such as I’ve been trying to describe, and it adds an enormous complexity to the whole situation. But it took … that’s why I say, it took me a while. I started going in, in January of … ’72, and reading the Act, and reading NEPA, and reading the refuge law, and reading all these other things, and becoming familiar with it.
But I never went to the state of Alaska. I, you know, everything I had was all there in paper, in front of me, and so forth. But I did get a mental image that I was talking about a big area, I can tell you that. But, it … in terms of just travel … and, of course, at the time, you know, we were working on this, Alaska had time zones that we don’t have up there today. So, at the time the only area in Alaska that was on the same time zone as … as a southern 48 state, which was Pacific Standard Time, was here at … at Juneau. Anchorage was 2 hours behind Pacific Standard Time and Bethel, Alaska was 4 hours behind. And Attu was actually in an Asian time zone. So, there were the time zone problems. I can remember getting up at midnight / one o’clock, when I finally did go up to Alaska, when I was trying to call back in and check into my office, getting up in the Bethel hotel and … at midnight, both because it took them to get to the phone, because the phone … was only one phone there and you have to get into this big long queue to get to the phone, but then … so I could call back to the DC office early in the morning and get the early morning events and so forth.
And then, the time to travel and … and the cost and the type of travel equipment that you had to have in order to do it. You don’t just get in an automobile and go zip around these little refuge proposals and say ‘well, well, we’ll do this and we’ll do that.’ You fly over them for hours at a time and then … and then you go back and try to put it together, mentally on a map, and figure it all out. It … we did put teams on the ground. And that was what we were working toward as each one of these exercises went its own way. But, by the time they got out there, we knew we were talking about areas that were known to be very important to the various kinds of resources that we were intended to protect.
And the debate … and debates between the agencies, because we found, right from the start, that the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife was interested in a number of areas that the Park Service was also interested in. and then when the Forest Service put its teams together, we suddenly found ourselves faced with, in fact, 42 million acres of national forest interest areas that overlapped with … I don’t remember what our total was, but we had various totals at various times that went as high as 80 million or 90 million acres of interest areas for the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. And then we also conflicted with the Park Service on about 40 million acres. And they conflicted with the Forest Service on a certain amount area. And then, there was the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation and the Wild and Scenic Rivers, which wasn’t really a conflict, because if they were inside of another one … another agencies proposal, it was going to be managed by that agency. If it
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wasn’t, it was going to be BLM managed. So, they were the only ones that didn’t really have any conflict resolution to take care of.
But, it meant … it meant my first exposure to … to really serious, confrontational level, disagreements and bantering between individual agency people. Not necessarily at the upper most levels, ‘cause they’ve got a little more civil. But at the staff level, it got pretty intense at times. And I think as a result of that, as well as a desire on the part of people like Assistant Secretary Nathanial Reed and his staff, and even Secretary Rogers Morton, to try to … to end up with a … with a recommendation package that … that had the muscle of multiple agencies going forward with linked arms, saying ‘we all agree to this and this is what we want.’ Rather than having the Park Service go up and say ‘we want all these areas,’ and then have the Bureau go up and say ‘we want all these areas.’ And then have the Congress and their staff say ‘wait a minute, there’s all of this area that you both want … what … how are we supposed to make the decision.’ They wanted to try to do it at home before they went up there; and … and also because we were going to have to do these environmental impact statements [EISs]. It suddenly became recognized that there needed to be mechanisms put in place to allow some coming together in some early resolution. There was going to be fights, but they would be resolved at a fairly early state.
So, although the agencies went pretty much their own way throughout 1972, by January of ‘73 it had gotten to the point where it fairly obvious there were serious discussions and disagreements. For instance, the Fish & Wildlife wanted the north side of the Seward Peninsula; and the Park Service wanted the north side of the Seward Peninsula. and … and it was causing consternation and … and frankly, it was keeping us from getting on doing some of the work that needed to be done as we were trying to do these battles. Each time we went in to make a presentation to a policy level person, you know, there was this shoving with the elbows … this sort of thing – mentally, if not otherwise.
So, in January of 1973 Secretary Nat Reed, Assistant Secretary Nat Reed, established within his arm what he called an Alaska Planning Group. And Alaska Planning Group was comprised of the US Fish & Wildlife Service, which had not by six … it didn’t become Fish & Wildlife Service ‘till ‘74, but I’ll use it starting here, it was still the Bureau in ‘73, but Fish & Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. Later … even later that year, it also took on adjunct teams from US Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management … but not anybody else. So we ended up with 5 agencies trying to work together at one time. But, by then we had been working together, in one form or fashion, at least in coordinating our presentations and putting together various kinds of paperwork. And the policy makers kinda wanted to see things that were done similarly. So they didn’t want to see a particular format used by the Park Service and then suddenly have to deal with something completely cockeyed and different from … from the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. So they forced us into unifying our materials and so on and so forth.
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This actually caused more consternation in Alaska than it did down in DC, ‘cause up there the offices did work separately, in their own offices. They did go talk to each other and stuff, but when it came to deciding that there were going to be materials submitted in a certain exact format and this is what it was going to be, and it used elements that they knew came out of the Park system, it cause the people in Fish & Wildlife to get a little bit upset about it. And the same thing happened over in the Park system, where it used a lot of stuff out of the resource value columns of the Fish & Wildlife Service. So, you know, we went through all those things. I … you know … just clear and deadly … there were … there were serious confrontations in the first couple of years. But, it started resolving itself as we worked our way through.
By middle year 1973, I had been in and out of Washington, DC, somewhere between 6 and 8 times. Each time for a minimum of two weeks and a maximum of about 4 weeks. So, I had spent a considerable amount of time. My job was Regional Biologist for the National Wildlife Refuges in Region 2, Albuquerque. My boss … bosses were very lenient, because they kept getting calls from the then Directors of the Fish & Wildlife Service saying ‘we’ve got to have this … we’ve gotta … I mean he’s read the law and he’s done this, and he’s done that, and so we can’t start somebody new, you’ve got to send him back.’ But I had pretty heavy duties in that Regional Biologist job that I was also responsible for, and I was trying to fill them back and forth. But, frankly, the … you know … as you continue down the pathway, you become kind of caught up in it, because here was an opportunity that you could see wasn’t going to happen anywhere else in a lifetime or career. So, here was something that was really worth trying to do something good about it -- and an opportunity to do it. So I wasn’t … I wasn’t totally kicking and screaming, but, you know, I also wasn’t always happy to … at the time that they said they needed me, to go in there to do it. But, I was doing it.
By mid-July they said look ‘why don’t you just come on in and … and take this position in the national wildlife refuge division’ which was population biologist specialist … wildlife population specialist … ‘and we’ll put you on loan to Larry Means over in Alaska Group until they finish that up sometime this fall, and then you come back and work in refuges.’ And I said ‘ok, I think I can do that.’ And my personal life allowed that to happen about that time. So, in a … July … mid-July … July 18th I think, I reported for duty in Washington, DC, full time, GS 13 biologist … Fish & Wildlife biologist.
And … and low and behold, I think within a week, I was told that I was going to become what they called the Coordinator for the K Street Environmental Impact Statement Operation. They had decided, after getting in some preliminary draft EIS’s and materials from each of the agencies in Alaska, and reviewing them on proposals as they were evolving at that time, the policy group, both in the Task Force - Alaska Task Force - at the Secretary’s level, and with Nat Reed and his Alaska Planning Group, had decided this is not going to work. There is no way that we can have these things prepared: in Alaska by those teams; mailed down here; presented; nit picked; and so on and so forth.
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And I might add, this was a time before technology. When we … when I first got into this and all the way through 1973, all of this material was being prepared on IBM Selectric typewriters. And the most technology we had was you could change the little ball and get interesting fonts. But other than that … and the Xerox machines were somewhat limited. And they had almost no fax capability at all. There was one fax machine on … in US Fish & Wildlife Service, and that was it. And some of the Reg… the Area Offices didn’t have … the Area Office in Alaska didn’t have a fax machine. And the telephone was … worked the old fashioned way. And so on. So, this stuff would often times come in with a lot of typographical errors just because of the pressure of … of the business and stuff. And … and that meant that the whole thing had to be retyped – completely. And then that had to be reviewed, and edited again. And sometimes it would take two or three times to get all of the errors resolved. ‘Cause sometimes you’d take it to a tired typewriter … typist and they would give you more errors that you got … than you took to them. In the new version. So, anyway, this got bad. But, anyway, I was supposed to become the Coordinator of K Street, which meant that I was supposed to go up to an office outside of the Interior building, right in the middle of ‘Lobby Town, USA,’ on K Street -- 1717 K Street.
There was a federal commission that was going out of business, being dissolved, and they had a bunch of office space up there. And the Alaska Planning Group had a high enough priority, by this time, that they … we took over the space. We actually almost pushed those poor people out of their offices. ‘Cause they had a few remaining staff trying to tie up business and we were flooding in there with all of our maps and pieces of paper and everything. But I ended up … I was directly supervising the core staff for the creation of 28 environmental impact statements, 28 initial master plan / development plans, and some brochures and other documents, to use to portray what these recommendations were all about. I was responsible for the typing staff, the graphics staff, the support staff necessary to do the printing and publishing. And I dealt with all contracting and general services, and the printer operation down in the Department of Interior, and several other departments. By the time we got 28 impact statements going, we were using printers in every department we could get into.
And then I had, not really reporting to me, but sort of dependent upon me and these office spaces, a Fish & Wildlife Service team, and Park Service team, a Forest Service team, the BLM and the BOR never actually put a team up there, but they did put individuals up there from time to time. And they each had their own little spaces, down around these corridors. And they had their own groups of writers. And they had … they varied from three or four writers and some editors … and I had an editorial staff too, that reported to me … three or four writers, all the way up to, at times I think the big teams would get up to 15 writers, sitting in there working away.
The operation almost immediately became a 24 hour a day, all the time operation. The offices were always open. People could come whenever they wanted to work
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on things. some of these guys would write and work for 8 or 10 hours, go get two or three hours of sleep, and then come back to K Street, and write and write and write. And I was also responsible … that’s where I grew some power … I was responsible for taking these things … they would send a person with me from the writing staff, but I was the one that negotiated with the Environmental Project Review Office in the Department of Interior, which gave us direct support of editing, and reviewing, and clearing, each of our environmental impact statements. And we started that operation the first part of August of 1973 and the deadline was December 18th 1973, wherein the Act said you have to send proposals to the Hill.
They had actually selected a Coordinator 10 days before I got to Washington, from the National Park Service. And from … he was from their Anchorage office. And he came in and spent a week looking the situation over, and then resigned. He didn’t resign from the Park Service, but he resigned from K Street. And he said ‘there is no way on earth that … that that can be done, and … and I am not gonna take … subject my career to that kind of failure, good by.’ And so he left. I didn’t … I didn’t actually know that until I’d been up there for 3 or 4 weeks. And God, I wish I was smarter. Anyway, I sort of looked at it and said ‘well, you know, I’ve never done anything, and never seen the Fish & Wildlife Service take on anything, that they couldn’t find a way to get it done.’ So, I told them, I said, ‘one caveat -- you get me the policy level decisions on these documents in a timely fashion, and I will get them delivered as you … as you want.’
Now that’s … that sounds fairly simple, but gets a little more complicated, and we’ll get into that.
But, nevertheless, they didn’t get me very timely decisions, I will say that. Some of the decisions were, in fact, still being made on … on the 1st of December, or a week before the 1st of December. And then some of them got changed on the 2nd or 3rd of December, or something like that. But, anyway, starting from scratch … we started … the teams could write the materials, but, I mean … here were biologists and economists, geologists, park planners, landscape architects, river specialists, foresters, engineers … you know, really talented, bright people, working their little buns off. Who were trying to learn what an environmental impact statement required, in the way of writing and analyzing and … and visualizing impacts. And our team, for instance, the Fish & Wildlife Service team, started off saying ‘look, we wear white hats, we do nothing but good things, I mean, the impacts are all rosy, hunky dory, wonderful things.’ And they went up to the Environmental Project Review with some documents that kind of said that, and the Environmental Project Review put big red X’s all over the paper and sent it back down and said ‘this won’t do.’ So …
NO – Is this John Ferrell and his group that was …
BR – This was John Ferrell. It was … John was the Project Officer. He reported to a fellow by the name of Bruce Blanchard. Bruce Blanchard was the equivalent of an Assistant Secretary, really. He was the Director of Environmental Project Review,
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but that was a big post when they set it up. So, yeah, I dealt with John and … and I dealt with Bruce, whenever I wanted to appeal John, which I tried a couple of times. And … and I tried to remain … in my job, I couldn’t afford to get too territorial, because I had parks, and I had all these other people. We had to get this stuff through, in some timely fashion. I had a lot of other things going on, I can tell you, trying to get the printers all lined up and the contracts written and so forth.
And again, we were stuck with the Selectric typewriters. And I only had three secretaries setting in K Street Operations. I had three secretaries, I had three editors, and one of the editors was a very senior Park Service editor, fellow by the name of John Bosberg. When he first went up there, they gave him the job of senior editor and advisor, and they put him in my office. Right in my office. His desk was right in front of my desk. And this developed … what … within two weeks, developed into a near catastrophe. John would set there and listen to my telephone conversation with a wide variety of people and things, from dealing with the Area Office in Alaska to dealing with the Park Service down in DC, or the Forest Service, or the printing office, or whatever. He would set there and listen to my conversation, and this conversation, on the telephone. Not having any idea what was coming from the other end of the line. And then run down to the Interior Department and report on that to the Chairman of the Alaska Planning Group.
And, I don’t remember what the specific thing was, but at … at one point, he went down and reported a conversation I’d had with the Area Office in Anchorage -- Fish & Wildlife Service, that seemed to indicate that I was just undercutting the Park Service every step of the way, and that, you know, that I was favoring the Fish & Wildlife folks, and so on and so forth. I think I was probably trying to solve a spat and I was trying to sound like I would go try to smooth it over and stuff. I don’t remember. But, in any event, he went down and reported that, and suddenly I’m on the carpet in front of the Chairman of the Alaska Planning Group. Who was, by the way, a wonderful man, truly knowledgeable about Alaska, and he was an Assistant Director for Planning in the National Park system, GS 16. I was a GS 13 – barely.
Fish & Wildlife component at the APG [Alaska Planning Group] consisted of Lynn Greenwalt, who was, at the time he was put on the Alaska Planning Group, Chief of Refuges for the Fish & Wildlife Service. Larry Means -- Robert L. Means, was his Alternate. Did all the work. Suffered all the slings and arrows. And had me as sort of on detail from now and then, and some other people who would come in from various places, including Alaska, to work with him on trying to get all the work done. The Park Service had a team that I added up the other day and there were 9 people at one time in the Park Service Washington team. It was sort of an uneven balance of power there. And BOR had one person working on it. BLM had a Division of Lands that was responsible for all of this land stuff in Alaska. And … and … and they were pretty bitter because they were loosing all this land and they wanted an oar in the water and it wasn’t being given to them. And then the Forest Service got into it, and they felt like we were going to just screw them. So they didn’t even want to come to K Street. But they finally did.
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Anyway, the upshot of it was, after they had read me the riot act, I sat down and told them ‘look here’s what happened, here’s what was said. I want John out of my office.’ I said ‘I … I can not work with somebody setting there listening to one half of a conversation and … and then coming down here and having you get all upset, when there’s noth… you know, it was innocent.’ But I said, ‘I don’t want to have to come down here and defend myself two of three times a week. I just refused to do that. So, if you want me to remain as K Street Coordinator, John gets out of my office.’ And he said ‘well, you’ll have to talk to John about that.’
So I … I didn’t talk to John. John went home on Friday night, as he usually did, at five o’clock. We picked up his desk and moved it. And we moved it in … we moved it in with the other editors, where he really belonged. And when he came back to work on Monday, his desk was down there. And he was upset. But, he couldn’t pick up the desk and move it back, so, therefore, I finally got him out of my office.
But that was the sort of expediting that needed to be done if we were gonna continue to move ahead. I was in there … my … my normal day at K Street started at about 4:30 and it would run until about 10:30 that night. What was I doing at 4:30? At 4:30 I would come through the Department of Interior main building, and go to about a dozen different offices in the Interior Department, and pick up these little stacks of paper, that were sometimes 2 inches and sometimes 1 inch, whatever, because we had an entire work force of women in the Department who would serve as typists. What was I doing at 10:30? At 10:30 I was picking up all the written materials from all the teams and carrying it down to Interior -- sometimes earlier than that, 8:00 / 7:00 -- and handing it out to all of these typists, and finding out how much they thought they were going to be able to work that night, and giving them all this material. So I would then collect it the next morning and take it back to the writers and hand it back to them. Then I could start my day of phoning and so on and so forth. But, as I said, K Street was open day and night anyway, it was a around the clock operation, so that we could …. 5 minutes?
NO – We got 5 minutes and a low battery, so, if you got a place to stop soon we can do that.
BR – Ok, I … I’ll find a place very quickly. The … that was the kind of intense operation it was. And it was also just a matter of … I did … I just didn’t have the luxury to go through a big negotiation with John, back and forth, to convince him. So, that was a really nasty thing to do. I did a couple of other nasty things over the course of the next couple of years, but they were because of this expedited – crazy -- situation I was in. Dealing with the staffs, the teams, the writing staffs, and stuff, was the big issue. And then dealing with policy people, and trying to get decisions, so they could actually know what they were supposed to write into their proposal. And I’ll talk about that much more after we get back on again. We’ll cut off for a while.
End of Tape #2, first set of tapes. End of DVD #2
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Start of Tape #3, first set of tapes
Start of Tape #2, second set of tapes
BR – Ok. Well, during the brief recess there, necessary break, I did look up a couple of … of statistics that I will put into the record here. The initial identification by Fish & Wildlife Service, Alaska staff in Anchorage Area Office, that was sent in to Fish & Wildlife headquarters in January of 1972, they completed that work in December of ’71, within weeks of the passage of the Native Claims Act. They identified 135 million acres and … and … of potential int… of interest to Fish & Wildlife interest, and 145 rivers that might be eligible for consideration under the Wild Rivers provision. So, those folks knew their business up there, there was no question about that.
And … so, back to the … back to the mid-July and beyond of 1973, K Street Operation, and so forth. The big … the big problem was getting policy decisions out of Alaska Task Force. And … and I was constantly going down and giving briefings, and carrying forward various kinds of statistics, and lots of slide shows. And Park Service was doing the same thing. BOR [was] doing the same thing. And … and … and I’m sure that the that the Forest Service, though they have had a little bit easier job over in Agriculture, still had to go through something over there. But in Interior, there was this back and forth, and we had … we had to deal with also the fact that the Forest Service wanted, and had mostly an overlap, on interest areas of the Fish & Wildlife Service. For instance the … the entire upper reaches of the Yukon Flats, and up into some of the additions that we wanted for the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, because it had timber on it, they … they had some interest in them.
One of the big fights -- characterize it as a battle, fight, whatever -- at the time, was the concept -- and this is the kind of thing that the policy group was … Task Force … and … and Nat Reed’s group was trying to deal with -- and that is: there were two major concepts of land management available under the … under the law. The law … the Alaskan Native Claims Act, which originally only had parks and refuges but grew during the process of passage to have the wild rivers first added, and then, at the very last minute, the forests were added to that law. So that there was consideration for these things, which meant that you had to play off between the multiple use land systems represented by Bureau of Land Management and DOI and multiple use system of Forest Service.
And it’s somewhat complicated because the Forest Service had the principle fire fighting operation for the state of Alaska. Although BLM, at the time, was … was the major fire fighter … federal fire fighter, in interior Alaska, they still had supervisory and consultative and coordination stuff out of the Forest Service. And the Forest Service kind of wanted to bring their … their fire fighting expertise, but they also wanted to bring their brand of multiple use up into interior Alaska. The BLM, in this case, was … was adamant with the policy group saying if … if, in fact,
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you don’t put one of these parks or refuges there, the land ought to come back to us. We are multiple use, and … and … and we want to have it for our management.
But remember, all this was still slightly ahead of the passage of the BLM Organic Act so they still didn’t have an organic charge like the Forest Service had. They were at a … somewhat of a decided weakness in that regard. And I might add, that the … the frankly, the … the refuge system was at a decided disadvantage during this period of time, in a number of areas. It had a … a great weaknesses in its authorities. And ….
And … so, anyway, those … those kinds of weaknesses, boy, they just became … chains around our neck. Because, I can vividly remember going into some of those policy task force meetings – briefings - and getting hit right between the eyes with, ‘well, what capability are … do you suggest the Fish & Wildlife Service actually has to take care of this kind of resource … or to do that?’ I had one guy get up and say very equivocally … unequivocally, you know, ‘the reason the Fish & Wildlife Service is call the ‘Coo Coo Clock Service’ is because your interests have been confined to ducks, and little beyond that. So why should we be thinking about giving you areas that are so comprehensive and vast and blahdy blah and blahdy blah, because you haven’t demonstrated that you have that technical … or otherwise … or will … capability.’ And … and here I am, a GS 13, low level biologist, with some apparent responsibilities far beyond that, and … and scrambling - literally scrambling - to try to find responsible answers to those kinds of statements.
And I … and I … and I wasn’t going to back down. I mean, I … I realized that maybe the … maybe that the Fish & Wildlife wouldn’t have backed me 100%, but I barked back at some of those people about, you know … it was an advocate for the Forest Service that made the statement about … in fact it was the Assistant Secretary for the Forest Service in the OMB meeting that made that statement. And it really irritated me. But it was true. At the time, I don’t think we could have denied it very strongly. But I denied it anyway, and … and … and made some disparaging remark about Forest Service. But, in any event, the … this is in front of … of OMB … agencies … all the … all the federal agencies were sitting there around this room and I was standing up, sort of toward the front, and they were shooting these kinds of statements and questions and stuff, from all over the room. It was … it was trial by fire in those days. So … so you … you had to learn.
I did want to mention that … that we … we ultimately got the decisions, from the policy groups, in time. That … that by about the first week of December of 1973, I had 23,000 volumes - printed volumes - of 28 environmental impact statements, plus a host of other documents. What we called … what we called master plans. And I have an example here, I think … let me get it out and show it to you … some of the documents that we had to prepare … I don’t have a copy of the draft environmental impact statements but I do have … I do have … the … the first master plans that we did, in concept. And then we put out in conjunction with the … the office put out a series of brochures which were explanatory, feel good kinds of things, for each one of the proposals that we were involved in. And … and some of
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those I was responsible for having to have the writers do them and print them and so forth. Some of them I wasn’t.
The original 28 EIS’s, though not massive, I mean … added up to 7000 pages of … of cleared … what was believed at the time to be … not the best quality ... I think John Ferrell withheld his highest praise for our … for our final environmental statements. But, even here, he felt that these were really responsible environmental impact statements. They did a good job. My office, my staff, me the Coordinator, I was responsible for the mailing of these things. So I had … and for protecting them, by the way. So, we were getting them printed, in the various printers. I was collecting them and putting them in a building, which was right next to the Forest Service office, over in the Department of Agriculture. They had a warehouse type building. They never knew that we were there. But, we had all these volumes stacked all over this place, 23,000 volumes in boxes. And so, we finished the documents, and had them all printed.
The Secretary had a news conference in a … in the Department of Interior. The night before the news conference in Interior, OMB finally came back with their final decisions. They had been dickering and dick … dithering and so forth, and they came back and made changes.
And their changes were like … this proposal down here was Harding Icefield - Kenai Fjords they called it - and right adjacent to it, there’s some little islands that we had fought over with the Park Service, and finally said they would go into the Alaska Coastal Refuge package. And Park Service wanted those. They wanted to have all the way out and take the little islands off of there, and I … and I refused to accept that. And Fish & Wildlife said ‘look, managing coastal islands … marine birds … marine mammals … that’s our bag. And the Park Service is gonna want to put guide services out there, and get visitors out there, and that’s not good for those rookeries. And therefore, the … if you want protection … if your goal is protection, then you want to put it in the refuge system. The Park Service can point at it, but they can stay off shore, and they can leave the animals alone.’ And low and behold, they let us do that -- sort of.
Morton’s proposal said ‘we’ll cooperatively manage this area, have Fish & Wildlife and Park manage.’ And they did that with a couple of areas. And they let the BLM into two areas. They let the BLM into Lake Iliamna and Noatak, which they wanted to get into the management scheme, so they were going to be cooperative management -- like game ranges. This was before the game range settlement. And so we were going to have co-management by BLM and Fish & Wildlife Service of those two areas. And there was a couple of others like that, where there was an … an effort to grow bigger, if you will. And OMB said no. They allowed one or two minor proposals … [Phone Ringing] Just let the tape get it. [Phone Ringing] Wonder if it’s them. Can we cut it off?
NO – Yeah. Sure.
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Break in taping
BR – So we had these 23,000 volumes. We had the decisions. We had OMB make these changes the night before the press conference. And I was to deliver a full range of EIS’s in the back of the … of the press briefing, while the secretary was on the stage making the presentation. And we had gotten these … these OMB decisions the night before. not only was there no way to reprint the documents before the press conference, but I had a bigger worry, what was I gonna do to illustrate these changes that they made … or to take care of them, ‘cause I couldn’t go rewrite the EIS’s, get them cleared, and go to the printer and stuff. So, my big … my big decision … unilateral decision again, was I will use errata sheets and addenda sheets to cover every little contingency. So I typed these things sometime during the night. Printed up enough sets. So the next morning, while they were up talking on the stage, I was in the back shoving these sheets into these documents. And … and some of it was pretty wild. I mean, when you say, ‘no, this area isn’t going to be managed by both BLM and the Fish & Wildlife Service, read this to … to mean alternative’ … whatever it was … ‘was adopted.’ We always seemed to have an alternative in the document that covered what the OMB decision was. And so, we just said, ‘this was a … this was an error. It should show that alternative as the preferred alternative, and it doesn’t. So, read it that it does. And all the impacts that go with that alternative.’ Or, in a couple of cases, it was ‘add these things here and there.’ Still pretty far out.
Anyway, I got them all stuffed in there before the reporters came and got their sets. And then, I had 23,000 volumes to stuff -- before they got mailed. First of all, I had 525 sets to stuff, because we were responsible … and they were going to be hand delivered, on to the Hill, December 17th, the day before the deadline. They had to be on the Hill, by the law, and our proposal, had to be on the Hill by December 18th. First of all, think about it: Congress is never in town on December 17 or December 18th. But this was when the deadline was. So on December 17th, we carried -- me and my … my ragtag staff of secretaries and editors and, you know, the guys that were there assigned to K Street -- were carrying these boxes all over the Senate and the House. We delivered sets to every single member of Congress. And, almost invariably, why, we were lucky to even … if there was anybody in the office, to hand them in to. And then they would set there in the foyer until somebody came back and knew what to do with them. But, they got delivered. It included all of the environmental impact statements for every office, plus those plans, plus draft legislation that was … that was sent up there. And we made our deadline. I was very, very proud of that. Still am.
But, anyway, the other thing that happened in late … in late 1973 that had a great effect on my life, and on the whole situation, was that Robert L. Means, who had been kind of a mentor to me since I’d been in there, since he knew so much about Alaska, was a GS 13 also. And we were dealing with a lot of GS 15s and lot of GS 16s, in other agencies. we were dealing with large staffs of people that … that … the Park Service had a GS 16, a GS 15, two GS 14s, two GS 13s, and a bunch of 11s in their … in their group.
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And Larry Means had been carrying the whole burden. ‘Cause Lynn Greenwalt had started as Chief of the Division of Refuges, but then during this time period, he was first pulled up to a … to the Assistant Director’s Office as Assistant Director for Fish & Wildlife Management, and then after a couple of months they moved him on up to Director. So he was ascending through this, and he had a very full plate, trying to do all of that. And he was ‘the representative,’ you know. And he started out as a GS 14, and moved his way up through until he was executive -- GS 18 level.
But, he was busy and we weren’t going to be bothering him and he could only make some decisions. So, Larry tried to get the Service to give him a pay raise … grade. And they just wouldn’t do it. So, he had an offer from the BLM to become Assistant Chief of their Division of Wildlife, and he took it.
And so in November of 1973, just shortly before this other stuff happened, Larry left the Service. And there wasn’t anybody in that position. In January of 74, just shortly after I took all those EIS’s all over the place, the Acting Chief of Refuges, who was Jim Pulliam at the time, called in to his office one day and with almost no … no hesitation, no preliminary anything, no discussion, he said ‘Bill, we’ve decided that you know how to spell it, so you’re it.’ And I said ‘I’m it?’ He says ‘that’s right, you’re replacing Larry.’ And I said ‘what do I do about K Street?’ He says ‘well, K Street’s done’ and I … ‘or, almost done’ … and I said ‘well, not exactly. We’ve got the drafts about done, but we’re responsible for doing finals, and we’re going to be taking comments, beginning next week there are going to be people sending in statements and comments and criticisms, and we’ve got to analyze them. We’ve got to have the writers back down and make changes in the document. We’ve got to go through this whole exercise all over again.’ He said ‘oh, my goodness.’ He says ‘well, we’ll talk about that later. Right now, you are it. So keep up the good work and good luck.’
And … so, somewhere in the middle of this … I, you know, I was up there at K Street, as I said, most of the time from 4:30 until about 10 or 10:30 and … and I had no choice, I mean, I had to do it. So I wrote the staff and said ‘look,’ it was about two weeks before all this other stuff here happened, ‘I’ve got to go back down to Main Interior, somebody has to be in the Fish & Wildlife Service Office taking care of Fish & Wildlife business that the Alternate was responsible for, and I’ve been appointed to take over those duties. I can’t just stay up here. So, I won’t be around as much as I can to help out up here, but I think you guys can carry the ball. And I’ve got to go do what Larry was doing on … on other matters -- very important.’ ‘Cause he was doing things like departmental regulations review and editing and … and a lot of briefings that I wasn’t able to do; and he was dealing and wheeling with the folks in Alaska, which I wasn’t doing as much of, or at least, mine was confined to the environmental impact stuff; and interacting with a whole lot of other Fish & Wildlife offices. And you know, he had a full plate, he was working many long hours too. So, I moved down to his office and started trying to teach myself about all the prehistory that went on and all the other stuff that he was working on. And I would … I would go to K Street at 4:30 and work in … up there, doing that normal stuff
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until about 8 or 8:30, and then I would run down to Interior and occupy that desk and office during the day, doing all the things that he had. And then at 4:30 I would go back up to K Street and work there until, you know, whatever, to get out of there. And I would do that 6 days a week, sometimes 7 days a week.
And that went on for about six months, or a little over six months. And they finally gave me a position ceiling, and said if you can find somebody, why, hire him. And I hired a refuge manager who had followed me to Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge as the Manager there. Not right away, but I think he was the one after the one after, or something like that. Fellow by the name of Larry Kline, and he had … he had had some family difficulties that meant he really couldn’t stay at Bitter Lake very comfortably and so he resigned from the Fish & Wildlife Service, and … and he was off somewhere else. And I … but I … I had some respect for Larry and … and I knew that he was kind of wanting to get back with the Service. So I called him, and he was available, and he said he would consider doing it, although he did not want to come to Washington. But the idea of being able to get back into the Service was enough of an attraction that he came to DC. And I put him in charge of K Street, sometime in the middle of the year while we were … before we finished the final EIS’s, but after they were well under way. But it was a heck of a welcome relief to have him come in and start handling that part of it, although he was over his head.
Break in taping
NO – Alright, you’re on.
BR – So, anyway, that was an extra little burden that we … we just simply had to face and … and it caused … it caused some consternation. I … I was again called on the carpet in Alaska Planning Group right at the very, very end. There occurred some slippage in one of the printing contracts, and it turned out to be a National Park Service Master Plan, not one of these little ones for us. It didn’t get done exactly when they thought it should get done, and so I got called down there. And I … and … and was told that obviously, I wasn’t doing my job as I was supposed to be doing it at K Street, or I would have had that done. And here I was trying to do this other thing. And he knew that, but he was Chairman of APG, and it was his right to do that. So, he kind of barked at me, but we got over it. I told him I didn’t think that the slippage was that bad.
The other thing that happened in ‘74 then, as I was trying to pick up these other duties that were typically the quote Alternate to our Representative, was that there were issues that had been created as I … as I mentioned at the … up toward the start, that where the state land selections had created a burden within certain areas of the state where the … it left very little land available for Native ‘in lieu’ selection, and even, in some cases, for village selection. And one of those really difficult areas was in the Cook Inlet region, which is centered around Anchorage and down through to the Kenai Peninsula. And … and almost … almost 70% of the states patented lands were in this area, all around Anchorage, and then, because the Kenai Peninsula is … is considered one of the most livable settle-able places in the state,
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they had … they had actually reduced the size of the Kenai Moose Range at one point, and poured in a bunch of land selections all along the eastern side, along the Inlet.
But that also meant that … that those villages, and would be villages, didn’t have a place to select lands. And the Cook Inlet Region and their villages were demanding that the Secretary make available lands in the Kenai Moose Range to solve their problem. They specifically wanted a minimum of 250,000 acres out of … out of the Moose Range. And of course, you might imagine they wanted it in the Swanson River oil field. But even when you talk them out of the oil field, they still wanted it in places that would really seriously jeopardize that refuge.
So, somewhat out of the clear blue of one day, I get called into Nat Reed’s office. And even though I worked on the Alaska Planning Team, and I was the Alternate for the Fish & Wildlife Service, so I was in … in and out of the Director’s corridor frequently, we were also expected to respond pretty vigorously when the Assistant Secretary want us to do something. And that became more and more frequent as we got more familiar with each other, through all these briefings and daily contacts on decision making and stuff. And so they called me into Nat Reed’s office, and they said … and Nat Reed said, you know, ‘go to Alaska tomorrow and … and … and meet with Kent Frizzell,’ who is the Solicitor of Interior at the time, ‘and … and he’s going to negotiate a settlement on Cook Inlet and you’re … you’re going up there to protect the Refuge. So, don’t forget that. Good by.’ And the Director wasn’t even in town.
So, I went and got a ticket and went to Alaska that night. And … and this was the most bizarre episode … one of the most bizarre episodes in my life. They … it was in a hotel … downtown hotel … and I went and reported to Kent Frizzell that morning. And … and he said, ‘go down to the hallway, second door on the right, that’s your … that’s your waiting area. And I want you to go there, and I’ll send for you when we need you up here.’ And then I noticed in the hallway there was a team for the Park Service staff in one door; there were BLM officials in another door; and I was in this door -- all by myself, ‘cause there wasn’t anybody else to assist me. Park Service had 4 people in there, and BLM had 3 or 4 people in there.
The next three quarters of the day was spent, apparently, in trying to decide the shape of the table they were going to use for negotiating this settlement that they wanted to … and that was because Panmunjom was going on about this time, and the Natives … the Native corporation leaders had seen and heard all that stuff about the table debate and … and so they decided that this was very, very important and they … they spent that whole morning and part of the afternoon debating how that table … and who was going to set where at the table, and so on and so forth.
Kent Frizzell, who was, as I said, the Solicitor … the Solicitor at the time -acting - at the Department of Interior, had just come back from negotiating Wounded Knee. Very, very difficult situation. His chest was out to about here. He thought he had solved some major problems. This was going to be candy. He’d be out of there in a
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day and a half and had a fishing trip set up somewhere … I can’t remember where, I think it was down on the Alaska Peninsula.
So, they went through this … this sort of slowed down Kent Frizzell a little bit about spending that much time talking about a darn table. But, anyway, once they got that all settled, they had map displays like this here, and over here, only they had some of the big 1 to 250 scale maps. And then they would call down the hallway, or send somebody down the hallway, and get a resource person from wherever they needed to – BLM, Park Service, or myself. They would call in, and they would present a proposal - a negotiation proposal - from the Cook Inlet Regional Corporation, which had three people -- the president of the corporation, the deputy of the corporation, and one or two resource people, that were setting there at the table. And, so, he would tell Kent Frizzell what he wanted here, where, somewhere else, and what he was willing to offer up. And then if the … if it was lands in the Moose Range they would call me up and say, ‘ok, what do you think about this configuration here’ and ‘give them that land there’ and so on, and so forth. And I never knew what they were bargaining on the other side. But then they’d call the Park Service team in.
And this whole thing was that the Park Service wanted Lake Clark National Park very, very badly. It was one of their highest priorities in the whole state. Cook Inlet Region had the capability of helping them get a clear and free lake like nat… Lake Clark National Park or of having so many inholdings in that place, there would never be a really good, great, Lake Clark National Park. And then the state got involved too, by the way. But, at least, at this stage … so they would offer some changed village selections, or inland selections that allowed the Lake Clark National Park to get freed up a little bit.
And like I said, I wasn’t aware, at first, that this was exactly what was going on. I found out after the first day that this was going on. So this went on into the second day. And, you know, it was … it

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Bill Reffalt, interview Oct. 12, 2006, Albuquerque, NM
Interview consists of 4 DVDs, the audio portion of which is copied onto 4 Maxell C120 audio tapes. This transcription was taken from the audio tapes.
The speaker seldom used the term “going to” almost always saying “gonna” and I have used that term throughout unless the speaker clearly said “going to.” Also “kinda” for “kind of” and “‘cause” for “because.” Although the speaker most often left the “th” off of the word “them” I have not used the slang terminology “ ‘em. ” “Gonna” “kinda” and “‘cause” are not usually recognized in most dictionaries as “real” words, but are used so often in everyday conversation that they are well known and are recognized in the spell check of most computer word processing programs. “ ‘Em”, while recognized by many dictionaries as the dative plural of “he” or “him” (Old and Middle English), is less well recognized by computer word processing programs. . If a word or numbers (tape counter notation) appears in “( )” with a “?” or in pink – I could not hear or I’m not sure I heard it right. Words or partial words appearing in [ ] are ones that I put in to clarify the thought. Proper names that I could not verify the spelling of show up in red text.
Others involved with the interview:
Dr. John Cornely --- Video equipment operator
Paul Tritaik – map roller
Christine Enright – Mr. Reffalt’s wife
Mr. Bill Reffalt is the speaker unless otherwise noted.
Start of Tape 1, first set of tapes; Start of Tape 1, second set of tapes
BR – Bill Reffalt
NO – Norman Olson, interviewer
************************************************************************
Ok, tapes on.
NO – Hello. My name is Norman Olson. I’m a retired US Fish & Wildlife Service employee and a volunteer at the Service’s National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Today is Thursday, October 12th 2006, and it’s about one o’clock in the afternoon. My guest is Bill Reffalt and this interview is being conducted during the Fish & Wildlife Service retirees’ reunion in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bill is also retired Fish & Wildlife Service employee and we are actually filming this interview at Bill’s home here in Albuquerque. Bill, I wonder if we could begin by having you tell us your full name and please, spell it for us; when and where you were born and raised; when and where you went to college; the degrees you received; how you came to work for the Fish & Wildlife Service; and how you first became involved with Alaska Lands issue during the 1970s.
BR – Sure, Norm. My name is William Reffault, although I’ve gone by Bill almost my entire life. And the name is spelled R E F F A L T. I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, and went to high school there. Joined the military from that post, and then came … when I came back, I went to school at both Boulder -- which is the
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University of Colorado -- and then transferred to Colorado State University and into the School of Forestry and Range Management at CSU. And that’s where I got my bachelors degree, and did some work on my masters. But I never finished it. I had a family and three children and had to … had to get out and earn a living. So, I moved on. While I was in college, at the end of my first year as a matter of fact, I received a … an inquiry from Region 1 of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife asking me if I would be interested in being a student trainee at the Desert National Wildlife Range in Nevada, during the summer. And I accepted that position; not realizing at the time that I accepted, by the way, that if I preformed satisfactorily, and didn’t make anybody mad, that I would automatically continue in that program and be offered a job when I graduated. But I found that out as I got into the program. And so, ultimately, that’s why it was easy for me to continue on. Although I did look at state management, the usual conservation officer type jobs, and so forth, and decided that I wanted to be permanently with Refuges.
So I graduated in ’63, and went to Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge in Idaho -- as the Assistant Manager. Um … as I moved through the system, and continued moving around -- 14 times in the first 6 years or 7 years I was with the Service -- I ended up at Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge here in New Mexico. And then I was selected for the Departmental Training Program, off of the station. And after 6 months in Washington, DC, why, they didn’t want me to leave Washington. They tried to keep all the Departmental Trainees and put them into jobs up in Washington. And didn’t want to stay -- and I couldn’t afford it, with my three children and stuff. I … Washington was awfully expensive. So I told them I had to come back to … to the Region, and they said, well, you can’t go back to Refuges. So I got the assignment with Federal Aid, and came back to Federal Aid in Albuquerque; and spent about a year and a half, almost two years, there. And then I transferred back to Refuges in the Regional Office here, just before they dissolved the 8 state Region and recreated the 4 state Region.
And it … it wasn’t very long after that … I did … I transferred to Refuges in approximately early ’71, and suddenly, in late December of 1971, I get a … a telegram requesting my presence in Washington, DC, with the … with the Division of Refuge Management, to work with Larry Means -- Robert L. Means, actually -- on implementation of Alaska, on a two to three week detail. And so the Regional Office agreed to it, ultimately, and I went in -- probably the second week of January 1972, which was a little less than a month after the Act passed -- the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act [ANSCA]. And we’ll get into what that Act did. But, that was my first involvement.
And between then and … and about July of 1973, I went back in there about 6 or 7 or 8 times; anywhere from two weeks … I think my longest stay was four weeks; again working on and becoming more and more and more familiar with what was … what was being called for. So, it became easier and easier for them to ask for me, and harder and harder for me to say no. Because … it is a very complicated Act and … and it requires certain things, and once you learn those things, why, it … it’s harder for them to try to replace that background. And so, it … it’s just like I said.
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It’s sort of like … it was a train running down a track and you got on and you sort of stayed on unless you got … either fell off or they pushed you off.
But that’s how I came to be involved. Um … and … and I started working, again on assignment, with Larry Means who was … Robert L. Means -- he was with Fish & Wildlife Service for a number of years, Refuge Manager in several stations. I think his last refuge station was the National Elk Refuge in Wyoming. And then he went to Washington in the Planning … in the Planning Branch of the … of the Refuge Division; and where he worked for one Harry Crandell. And I bring his name up because it will come up again in this conversation. But … even before the Act passed, I’m not exactly sure when, but I believe sometime in about 1969 or 1970, when … when it was clear that if the Alaska Native Claims Lands Act, as they were calling it, was actually passed, there was gonna be a provision in there that called upon the study of all the lands in Alaska with the possible future recommendation for national parks, national wildlife refuges, wild and scenic rivers …. And … so they assigned Larry to track the legislation; become familiar with what was going on; sort of monitor and keep involved with it. And when the Act actually passed on December 18, why, he sort of was able then to hit the ground running. The Area Office in Alaska, also, was hitting the ground running. And by January of ‘72, when I … just shortly after I first went in there -- it arrived while I was there, there was an entire package of materials -- about 150 pages or so of materials, and I have a copy of it here -- that was sent in by the Regional Office, which identified interest areas for the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife all over the state of Alaska.
And those interest areas where identified because of the expertise of the personnel of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife who had been in Alaska -- some of them for 25 / 30 years. So, they put that package together, running like mad. The Park Service and the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, neither of which had offices in Alaska, both established offices in January of ‘72, and … and turned loose teams of their own. The Park Service had some experience in Alaska that dated back … I think the Sitka Monument was established around 1909, but that wasn’t their main involvement. I think McKinley National Park, which was established in 1917, gave them a presence, and … and … and some of their personnel were quite knowledgeable about Alaska. But, in any event, they had to send … they had to pick people and send them up there and so forth. They were just a little bit behind.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act … I think we probably need to discuss just a little bit what it … what it did, and why it did it, as we go on. The … the Native Claims Settlement Act was destined to happen sometime … beginning in 1884. At that time, shortly after Alaska was purchased from Russia, the Congress of the United States, in trying to implement and … and deal with this new territory, or possession as they thought of it at that time, it wasn’t even an organized territory, and the Organic Act [was] to sort of make it a territory and treat as a little bit more like a territory, they recognized that there were long standing aboriginal claims to land occupancy, and to the use of the resources of those lands. And they … they felt they had to do something with it, and so they put a provision into the Alaska Organic Act that said that … that the Alaska Natives claims would be dealt with by the
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Congress of the United States -- nobody else … the territory couldn’t do anything about it; the state couldn’t do anything about it; or whatever. That they would take care of it.
Well, as is not untypical for our Congress, things then languished for three quarters of a century, and they didn’t really do very much about it. The Natives themselves were not an organized entity, because there are four major tribal divisions -- some would even say more than that -- but there are at least -- the Aleut … or, yeah, the Aleuts in the Aleutian Islands; the Eskimos, broken into two major groups -- the Yupik Eskimos and the Inuit, the North Slope; and … and the Indians, which break into several groups -- the Haida, the Kutchin [Gwich’in?], and at least one or two other subgroups, in southeast Alaska. And they had warred, as many Indian tribes did throughout the United States and elsewhere. And weren’t terribly friendly, although they did have trade arrangements and so forth.
But, as things continued to press upon them, beginning with the Statehood Act, which was passed by the Congress in 1958, signed into law by President Eisenhower in January of 1959. As that happened, and the state moved forward in … it’s extraordinary Statehood Act, which I’ll have to talk about in a minute … but as they moved forward, they started impinging upon the Natives. They started impinging upon their lands; they started impinging upon the areas that they used for subsistence. This whole modern entity was coming down on the Natives, and they really weren’t prepared for it. And they didn’t like what they saw at the first. And then, of course, the federal government was pretty heavy handed also -- and had been for a long time.
So, the Natives … I think there were a couple of things that happened that sort of pushed them over the edge. One of them was Project Chariot. And Project Chariot, for those [of you that] don’t know or remember it, is one of the peaceful uses of the atom bomb that we tried to work on back in the very early … late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Project Chariot would have exploded an atom bomb just off of Cape Thompson, in northwest Alaska. And by so doing, it would create - in theory - a deep-water port. In case you want to know where Cape Thompson is, it’s right up here. Now, normally the sea ice comes down as far as somewhere in the vicinity of St. Lawrence Island – here - sometimes coming all the way down to Nunivak Island, but not as frequently. So, and there is no deep-water ports all along this coast, after … frankly, after the Aleutians, this all becomes fairly shallow all the way up through there … and all of this has … has … you have to use littering to take goods and services into these … all of these areas. So, a deep-water port here would have permitted resources throughout the north … the theory was … the resources throughout the north … and there is a huge amount of coal, which is basically uneconomical because there is no way to get it out. And so Project Chariot, I think, was aimed at things like that.
But, Project Chariot as … as you might imagine also scared everybody. And particularly, it scared the Natives up there. And they found themselves bonding
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more and more together; the issues were becoming a common threat and … and eventually a brotherhood grew out of the Project Chariot … a Native brotherhood.
There were other things … there were … there was a major proposal, after the state had selected some lands over by Fairbanks, there was a major proposal to develop a … a normal white mans recreation area on that site. And it turns out that the site was … just considered a vital subsistence area for the village of Minto. And … and so they started fighting that and they … they gathered forces and … and, of course, got some white interest also, but it was mostly a Native kind of thing and ….
And then of course, in 1968 they discovered oil on the North Slope. And the trouble with discovering oil on the North Slope - right up here - is that you immediately have the problem of how do you get it out. And you have to use ice-breakers if you’re gonna … if you’re gonna try to do it by ships. And again, you’ve got all those shallow waters; you’ve got that ice. You’ve got 200 miles, or more, of ice. We don’t have any ice-breakers in our fleet, and have never had an ice-breaker in our fleet, that could go through that kind of ice - that far. So, ice-breakers were being looked at, but they weren’t considered the best option.
The resource, as the oil companies knew but nobody else did, was huge. It was an extraordinarily large field, what they now call a ‘super giant field’ and … and probably had somewhere between 20 and 25 billion barrels, in place resource. Primarily oil hydrocarbons, although it also had gas. They were … they expected initially to be able to recover between 8 and 10. That would be a normal recovery rate. But that’s 8 or 10 billion barrels. We don’t have any other place in the United States with that kind of resources.
So they had to move a lot of oil. And it was going to be an enormously wealthy kind of thing to do.
So the other option was to look at an overland exit. And that’s 800 miles from up there to down here, to the deep-water ports that are ice free. There was another possibility to come down around these mountains and through them and over to the McKenzie Valley. And there was a proposal that might have taken it along the coastline. But both of those would have put our oil shipments into Canada, and there was a bit of unease with doing that. The other route, the one … the all Alaska route, had the … had a lot of benefits, including all the jobs to Alaska and so forth. It had the downside in that it was going to have to travel across a huge amount of lands that were claimed by different Native entities. And although, at first, the Natives kind of went along with it, or at least didn’t raise huge Cain, before they ever put the first pipe in the ground, the Natives had filed over two hundred lawsuits that threatened to stop the oil pipeline, no matter what the Congress did, for years and years; make it even extraordinarily uncertain, or even stop it -- period. And so that pushed the Natives finally over the full edge. They formed the Alaska Federation of Natives. They organized, and they started learning how to get along together. And as they did, they became a stronger and stronger entity among themselves.
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So, that’s the kind of pressure that eventually came to bear in passing the Alaska Native Claims Act.
Meanwhile, let’s go back and take a quick look at the Statehood Act, because in my … in my personal opinion, and I think it … I have … I could give you names of other people that would agree with me, wholeheartedly, the Statehood Act is what tipped and started this whole thing. Yeah, Prudhoe Bay had its role. There’s no question about it. But the Statehood Act, which began implementation in 1959 … by the time this was happening -- in 1962 on Project Chariot, and 1968 on Prudhoe Bay, sometime in between there for the recreation site and some of these other things that pushed the Natives together -- the Statehood Act allowed the state of Alaska to go out and actually select the lands that would be state lands under the Act.
In our entire history, there’s only one other state that had that kind of allowance, and that was Nevada -- only after Nevada had gone back to Congress, after its original Statehood Act, and petitioned them to give them selection rights rather than force them along the line of the traditional statehood act land … land give. Normally in America, from the eight … 1787 Ordinance onward, the states – the new states as they came into the Union, although they were considered on an equal footing with all the other states -- were given, for various purposes but primarily for roads and schools … the development of roads and schools within their territories … were given two sections of land -- Section 16 and 36 of every township. Wherever Section 16 and Section 36 fell; if it fell in the middle of a lake -- that’s what they got. If it fell on the top of a mountain -- that’s what they got. If it was in a dry gully -- that’s what they got. And that was the way it went.
As we moved to the West, and got into the really arid states, they did get magnanimous in the federal government and up in Congress, and they started giving first three, and then ultimately, four sections. So some states, like Arizona, got Section 16 and 36 and Section 32 and … I can’t … I think it [was] 22, but I can’t remember it for sure. But four sections. Under any of those scenarios -- four sections [was] the ultimate. Alaska would have been eligible for about 42 million acres of land.
But, no. That’s not what Alaska got. Alaska got 102 and a half million acres selection rights, without ever asking for it. When Nevada asked for it, they had to give back half of their total in order to get pre-selection. So, whatever Nevada’s was -- it was about 3 million acres -- they had to give back about 1 and a half, and they got one and a half of selection rights.
Selection rights were a biggie.
And so, Alaska got 102.5. Plus they already had about a million - slightly over a million - acres of various lands that had been transferred to private ownership, community ownership, etc., over the course of time. And they were given an additional 800 thousand acres -- 400 thousand out of the forests - national forests,
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and 400 thousand out of the BLM, for community enlargement. When you added it all up, Alaska - at statehood - got over 104.6 million acres.
That’s bigger than the state of California – entirely. So, it was a very generous grant.
But that isn’t where it stopped. There were -- and I won’t go into them -- but there were, literally, an entire page full of special provisions. Including the provision that allows Alaska to get 90% of the rents and royalties from all federal oil and gas leases. Which is a big deal. And it saved the state of Alaska, at one point in time, they’d become somewhat arrogant with it, and the Congress has … has cut it back in petroleum reserves, when they opened the petroleum reserve. But, it’s still a big deal.
And it … the rational that was used was that Alaska was not a ‘reclamation state’, there weren’t going to be any Bureau of Reclamation dams in the state of Alaska. And in the … throughout the other 49 states, the funding from oil federal land and gas royalties, I don’t remember the numbers any more, but some percentage of that - about 37 and a half percent or something, go into the Reclamation Fund, which goes into creating reservoirs, dams, and so forth, for irrigation districts out across the West. And Alaska wasn’t going to get that, so they took that 37 and a half percent and gave it to them in money, directly out of the oil and gas rents and royalties. Which is … it could be extraordinarily sizable. They also allowed them to select lands that had potential -- high potential for oil and gas. Other states weren’t allowed to do that. States were not allowed to go into a known geological structure and select lands -- because they didn’t have land selections, to begin with. I think if their lands happened to fall there they got it, but there was no other way for a state to actually go in and … and take on federal oil and gas. That was kept for all the people of the nation. Except in Alaska. And there was other provisions. Alaska just got one monstrous bunch of benefits.
But there were some caveats in that original Act, and a couple of them have been very important to us, so I will mention them. They had what they called the PYK line, which is … which stands for Porcupine / Yukon / Kuskokwim line, which starts right here, flows down Porcupine River, hits the Yukon River on the north side - ten miles north of the river, follows it all the way down here - to the 161st meridian approximately, cuts across to the Kuskokwim River, goes out to the Bay, cuts directly into Bristol Bay to about here, then cuts directly back east across the Alaska peninsula, and then goes southward -- into oblivion, I guess. And, all of the lands to the north and west of that line, in the Statehood Act, required that the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Interior approve any land selections by the state of Alaska.
Now, I can imagine what it did to the Alaskans ego to have that happen to them, but then here they were getting all 104.6 and blahdy blah and blahdy blah. So, I’m sure that they screamed and yelled and kicked and did whatever they did. This was our national defense purposes … protection, so that the military, if they wanted a piece
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of property within that area, they’d be able to make exclusive federal withdrawals, and put in military bases or whatever, and they wouldn’t have to worry about conflicting with the state. Ultimately, the state agreed with to PYK line. But it was still very awkward for them. And you note that the whole North Slope was in the PYK line.
Nonetheless, everybody knew that there was high potential for oil up here on the North Slope, and that was why, since 1962, up … in fact before 1962, in 1942, at the beginning of WWII, the … the entire Petroleum Reserve -- they called it Pet - 4 NR [Naval Petroleum Reserve #4] in the first … We had a series of petroleum reserves in a … in the United States, and PET - 4 is a 23 million acre area right up here, on the North Slope. And the reason we had that is because some of the Eskimos in the area had pointed out for the white people that came up there, seeps on the surface of the soil in several places, where you had actual petroleum product coming up and seeping out of the ground. And in 1923 … wasn’t Calvin Coolidge, it was that other president back in ’23, that set the whole reserve aside for possible use by the Navy, because we were converting our Navy from coal to oil, and this was going to be a potential reserve for the future. So all of that was over there, and was unavailable to the state. But, there was this other area, and they … they went ahead and had a tentative lease and exploration going on, which lead to the 1968 discovery.
But all of that pressure also meant that they were out here selecting lands -- particularly in and around Anchorage, and down on the Kenai Peninsula, and then some other areas -- which were removing lands that the Natives had used for generations -- and had used them for everything from their subsistence gathering / hunting / fishing and so forth, to just travel / transportation / interplay between villages. And they were being cut off by all of this state land selection. And they just felt the pressure of a vice sort of coming around them in all these places. So, very much so, the Statehood Act had caused unrest in the Native community. The feeling that if things kept going, there wasn’t going to be anything available for them, and they wouldn’t ever get their claims, and blahdy blahdy blahdy blah. All of that helped, very strongly, to lead toward this ‘federation of Natives.’ So, with those two things happening, the pressure on the Congress to do something about the oil transportation system -- the pipeline as it turned out to be -- which the Congress immediately wanted to do until they found out that it wasn’t going to be that simple. There was a petition filed for a pipeline, I think in … 1969, in July 1969, so it was just about a year after the discovery well was drilled. But it couldn’t go anywhere because, by that time, the Natives were very upset, and they had been filing lawsuits everywhere they could.
There was one other set of actions that are very important here. Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under President Kennedy and President Johnson, was quite sympathetic toward the aboriginal land claims. And very concerned that all of this stuff was happening, and it was removing options for the Congress to come up with a logical settlement for the Natives. So, beginning in 1966, when the state started to lay down a large block of land selections throughout the state, Udall balked. And
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… and he had some support up on the Hill. And he put on what was known as the ‘land freeze.’ Now, of course, in 1966 his authority to put a land freeze, of any wide magnitude and any great duration, was extremely limited. You didn’t have the BLM Organic Act. You didn’t have a lot of other tools that, today, we look back and think nothing about. But, when he did that, it was … it was … he had some limited limitations on his authority. So, he did it in 1966. But then he had to keep renewing it. He had to keep finding other avenues, other pieces of BLM law, some of it very antiquated, to try to continue keeping the state from asking for land transfers and making new selections and so on. And … but this was irritating, as you might imagine, to the state -- quite irritating to the state, and some of its friends in Congress.
So there … there were … by the time that the Native Claims legislation actually got started, there was both a great reluctance on the part of many of the key senators, and of course the state of Alaska, and a lot of other people, that said, ‘well, you know, if the Natives need a few million dollars, give it to them, but then let’s move on.’ Well, the Natives didn’t want a few million dollars. They wanted land. So they started fighting for it, and especially in 1969. And it got more and more and more; and there were huge pressures brought to bear. And I had one resource that … that gives a very good account of all that, and that’s this book by Mary Clay Berry, which was very well researched, called Alaska Pipeline: Politics of Oil and Native Land Claims. And it … and it’s the best source of telling you where all the pressures were and who did what and names all the things and so on.
But it’s very important to understanding how the Claims Act kind of forced its way out this little narrow pipe at the end of this huge, big 48” pipeline. And the … the settlement that they finally got, and the one that we had to deal with, was 44 million acres of land -- when you add everything together. The actual Act says 40 million acres, but the Act also recognizes that they could take their previous reservations, which was 4 million acres of land. And then there were a whole series of strictures and allocations. So you had about 22 million acres going to the village corporations, which they … they positively had to incorporate. They could go non-profit or they could go for profit, but they had to become corporations, which was a thing the Natives had a hard time coping with, mentally. And then they had the regional corporations, which some people insisted would form the economic mechanism … that after the actual money that was given to them -- 967.5 million dollars or somewhere thereabouts, in the Act -- part of it coming from the state and part – most - of it coming the Feds -- after that was allocated, then they … there needed to be both mechanisms for investing that wisely - not just handing it out to individuals, but then also they had to have ongoing economic viabilities.
So they’re hoping that these regional corporations would become strong, economic bases -- similar to the corporate structure outside. With limitations – they … they couldn’t sell their shares and they had to operate within the guidelines of their … their members were in fact, the enrolled Natives from within certain identified geographic areas. The Natives themselves got 100 shares of stock for each person that was alive on the day of the passage of … or born on that day, you know, the 9
passage of the Act … which was December 18, 1971. And that was to be the shareholders. It didn’t deal with any Native born after that date, so they’ve had to … they’ve had to figure out a way to deal with the newer Natives.
But, in any event, they got 100 shares of stock in their village corporation … that they decided to enroll to, and 100 shares of stock in the regional corporation. If you were a family man and you had a wife and five children, you got 700 [phone ringing] shares of stock – altogether - you know, each member of your family, [phone ringing] in that persons name, got these … these shares of stock. Well, they didn’t know what do with these shares of stock, and they could vote them the same way normal corporate structure, which is very arcane and very complicated. And man, they didn’t learn any of that for a while. All of that had to be learned. And they had all that pushed on them.
So the Claims Act, at the same time it gave them what looks like a tremendous lot in benefits -- certainly no other Native tribal entity in America got that kind of deal. I mean, even the Navaho Reservation, as huge as it is … is … is not like what this thing did. But still, there were all of these arcane provisions. And even when I got involved in 1972, and started talking with Native representatives that were coming in and talking to us on various matters right from the start of my details, it was apparent to me that they didn’t even know, really, what land area meant in boundaries, and what package of rights and benefits went with land, and what package of responsibilities. And things like the easements -- there were requirements in the Act that called upon the Department of Interior to … to decide which public easements must be placed on the Native lands, so that people could actually plan on crossing the Native land. Because they … some of these places … otherwise, it would stop all traffic at certain points, and they could put toll bridges or whatever. So … they … those were arcane principals that the Natives, clearly, did not understand at the time.
So that … responsibilities that rested with the Natives were awesome, in and of themselves; to learn all of these things. And they were given the charge to enroll, decide which village they wanted to become a member of. Enroll, get all that signed up. Then they had to join together, make land selections for their village. Make land selections for their regions. The regions … the regions got the subsurface lands under every village selection. So if the village selected there, the region got the subsurface land. The villages got no subsurface land. So they’ve got that problem of … of split estate. And it’s caused some serious rubs since then.
The regions also got, under the formula, a certain amount of surface and subsurface land, some of it being dictated in the … in the law, where they used, as we typically did, they used a checkerboarding.
And I might go to the maps for just a little bit of time, here, but … The concept of checkerboarding goes way, way back. And it’s caused problems for America, as far as I know. A … although it’s … it’s had some side benefits, I suspect, but it certainly … The first major use of checkerboarding that got everybody’s attention was when 10
we … when we gave land to the railroads, to build railroads from the eastern transportation systems, about the Mississippi River, to our west coast. And there wasn’t any money to do the job, and so we couldn’t give them monetary incentives. And so they gave five major railroad corporations these huge land grants, on a checkerboard basis, along their rights of way, for 30 miles on either side -- which is a huge swath of land, gigantic amounts of land, in checkerboard fashion, on every checkerboarded section, alternating. And they were … they ultimately sold those. They … there were land schemes; there was all kinds of things that went on.
And all the evils of checkerboarding were known from that time -- which was in the 1850s, forward. So we knew that there were evils of checkerboarding, but they went ahead and used … and used checkerboarding.
So, let me take a map or two off of here [lots of paper / map noise] and go through them just a little bit. And then put that behind you on the case. [Lots of paper / map noise] Um … I won’t stay up here too long, but this is essentially what Alaska looked like in 1954. Almost no transportation structure, and what transportation structure there was, was all centered in … in this area. The red lines are … are roads and the rest of Alaska consisted of all these little red airplanes. The little red airplane figure says there is some kind of an air … field … runway, in all of those places.
And, as I said, there about 220 bush villages. There are 220 listed in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and so there are approximately 220 of these little red airplanes on this map. Ok? And they … they’re all over the place. Now, some of those little airplanes mean that there’s about ... a one thousand foot airstrip is what it is, and if you’ve got a Super Cub you can land on it. Otherwise, you’d better not try it. But, nevertheless, that was the basic infrastructure of Alaska, as we typically look at a … at a territory or state in 1954.
[Lots of paper / map noise]
Yeah. That’s not gonna work quite as well because the map’s smaller, but this is the … this is the state of conditions in 1971 September, which was just immediately before they passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. So this is what the state land ownership and pattern looked like.
Let me explain a little bit. Here’s the Naval Petroleum Reserve #4 [Pet-4 Nr] I mentioned -- about 23 million acres. Here’s the area across the center of the … had been tentatively … it was not patented to the state, but it had been tentatively approved to the state of Alaska. Here’s our Arctic National Wildlife Range, which was 8.2 million acres, I believe it was. Then these check … these cross hatched areas here and here, and I … and the two yellow areas are BLM lands that were under the classification of Multiple Use Act of 1960 … had been placed … ’62, I guess it was … had been placed into … these were pending classification and these were classified under that Act, which put them into a special category.
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This was the other impinging project that I forgot to mention. I meant to. I couldn’t come up with it when I was talking, but the Rampart Canyon Dam. Ten and one half thousand acres -- 10,500 acres -- of … of inundation; would have covered up 6 villages, lived in by 4000 / 5000 Natives; would have generated a huge amount of electricity, for 100,000 / 200,000 people. But they didn’t need that much of electricity, so what were they going to do with it? The Fish & Wildlife Service took a very, very strong position against that. But that all occurred in the … in the 1960s, again. And was another project that scared the Natives, for sure. I mean, that somebody could just come in and flood their homeland -- as it would. It would flood the entire homeland that … two Gwich’in subtracts, up here in the Fort Yukon area and down to Stevens Village. So Rampart was a big deal.
Rampart also meant that this land was classified in a certain fashion at the time that the Native Claims Settlement Act passed, which put it special … into a special category, which is why I mention it. Then these other kind of browns and taupes are … are state selections. The greens are various kind of parks; and here’s Kenai National Moose Range; and here’s the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge; and Katmai; Mt. McKinley; Glacier Bay. And here’s the southeastern forest -- the largest national forest in the system at … well, even today, it’s over … it’s about 16 million acres. And then, of course, the Aleutian chain, which starts right here, below Izembek, and runs all the way out to the far end of the Aleutian chain -- a 1000 miles -- which was set aside in 1913 as the Aleutian Islands National Wildlife [Refuge].
So that’s about what the state looked like. Here is the corridor that was hypothesized in 1969, after the permit application came in. And, you can see, it courses through an awful lot of lands. And there were Native villages all up and down along there. And … and so, there was going to be a real struggle. But this is the conditions of things just before the Native Claims Act passed.
[Lots of paper / map noise]
You know, even though this thing is dated up here – 1971 October -- I think it was later than that.
But this shows some of representations of the initial identification of areas of interest. In this particular case, it was the National Park [Service] areas of interest. And so fairly early on, you can see that they were interested in some area here, and … and Skagway, of course, this was a … an historic park where the … where the main gold rush happened; and here was the Wrangle-St. Elias; and additions to Katmai; additions to McKinley; there’s the big Brooks Range; and Lake Clark. So these were their initial identifications. There was a similar map for the Fish & Wildlife Service. And I don’t know whether I’ve actually got it. I think our legs giving out on us over there.
[Lots of paper / map noise]
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Ok. This one’s harder to see, I know, but this one shows the combined Fish & Wildlife Service interest areas and Park Service interest areas. So I … I’ll point to some … here was a major Fish & Wildlife Service interest area which was associated with the Artic Range extensions. And then of course the … the huge Gates of the Artic; the Kobuk Sand Dunes, and Kobuk area in general; the Seward Peninsula; the Yukon Delta; interior basins -- which were extremely important for water fowl; the Lake Iliamna / Lake Clark areas -- which are … a huge recreational draw, is what it boils down to. And then the south side of the Alaska Peninsula, which became an interest area for the Fish & Wildlife Service; the Togiak region for Fish & Wildlife Service; St. Lawrence Island was a Fish & Wildlife Service interest area, but it turned out to be a previous Native reservation. So again, you’re … you’re starting to see how … and here’s the Lake Clark Park proposal. And there were already starts at identifying island groups that the Fish & Wildlife Service was interested in -- from colonial nesting birds and … and certain water fowl.
[Lots of paper / map noise]
I think that’s probably the same thing with the titles of them over here and the areas are numbered. So, it’s just a … probably something a little bit better to be seen (-?-) by the video, but it’s essentially the same thing.
NO – You’re starting to see places like Yukon Flats, Koyukuk, Innoko and …
BR – Yeah this is Yukon Flats. And here’s Kanuti; here’s Nowitna; and this is Innoko. This is Nowitna, Koyukuk, Selawick, the north side of this … of the Seward’s Peninsula, the huge Yukon Flats, and then this whole region here - were all Fish & Wildlife Service interest areas -- plus extensions to the Kenai Moose Range. [Lots of paper / map noise] These maps, by the way, were used in the initial briefings that were being prepared. These are some of the things I worked on when I first went in … on detail, as information was coming in from Anchorage …and then, we at … we were responsible for taking it up to the policy makers. But shortly after the act passed … the act passed in December of ’71 … and January 15th of ’72, the Secretary of Interior at the time, which was Rodger C. B. Morton, established a task force, an Alaskan Task Force, of all these policy people that he wanted involved -- both in implementing the Act and in making policy decisions as related to the Act. The other thing that the Act did, that I didn’t mention, which is important, is it … in Section 17 … which contains the language for doing all the studies, and it also contains the authority, and the language for the authorities, to withdraw huge amounts of lands, which we’ll talk about very shortly. But in addition to that, it created a Federal / State Land Use Planning Commission for Alaska -- which was to be a temporary body of the combined federal / state, to stand off, just a little bit to the side of the Interior Department, and act as an advisor.
And so this … this body, which spent an awful lot of money, and had at one time a huge staff, because they were given the … the option of taking people out of the agencies - with the agencies continuing to pay for them, and work as staff to the … to the planning commission. And the planning commission was a board of about 8
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or 10 people that were selected by either the federal side or the state side. And they became an interesting adjunct factor in the whole panoply of movement. They didn’t really have any responsibilities per se. They were given some broad charges in the Act, and so they could, within those charges, sort of do whatever they wanted to. And they developed a huge amount of materials; put out a whole bunch of publications. They did some very worthwhile things in terms of inventorying and accessing lands. But they also came up with a fifth system concept of a cooperative land system. Ultimately, that would have been under the charge of a continuing Land Use Planning Commission. So it was also a … a self perpetuating body.
Ok. This is January 72, so this is just as the Act passed. And there is … there is some differences in what you’ve seen before, although a lot of them are subtle. The state had laid in some more land selections, and so they had put in a whole bunch … these were just selections, they hadn’t moved anywhere through the process. But, in spite … in spite of Udall’s land freeze … Udall’s land freeze did keep them out until the Act passed. But, it gets a little bit complicated. The … the state of Alaska, in its Statehood Act, has a provision that … that there’s a delay for any major federal land withdrawal to take place. There’s a little bit of a lag and a delay that … that goes into place, to give them time to react to it and so forth. ‘Cause they had always been worried about these instant land withdrawals by the federal agencies. And there were quite a few, I mean, I can … I can point out that in … as early as 1908, the federal government withdrew about 15 million acres on the Yukon Delta, by Teddy … and Teddy Roosevelt signed the paper that created the first big, huge, bird reservation up there. The state eventually bad mouthed that thing and threatened all kinds of things. And so, in 1921, they un-made it and dissolved it. And we put it back together, and extended it a little bit.
But, in the meantime, Nunivak Island was reserved, the Aleutian Islands were reserved, other places … other islands were reserved in Alaska; and some areas other than that. And both the state and the Natives were a little bit sensitive about that. But, when the Congress passed the Native Claims law, all these little red squares that you see here with … you can’t see it probably, but they have red square-ish like lines around them. These are … these are withdrawals that were made in the Act. These are the village selection withdrawals. And so here’s the core township - the red square is 23,040 acres in size - that little square - and then there are two tiers of townships surrounding it … circumference around it. And within those two tiers of townships, there was to be a checkerboarding by the villages and the regional corporations, for their primary land selections.
Now, if they couldn’t get enough lands to satisfy their particular eligibility, then there were to be other areas withdrawn, under other authority, as close to these lands as you could get it, on public lands, and from which they would take selections. And those areas were called ‘in lieu’ selection areas. And they had … they had to be three times the amount of land that was … that was ultimately going to be selected, so that the Natives would have a choice. They didn’t want to just have the government decide, ‘ok, here it is, here’s what you’re gonna get.’ So they gave them three times the amount of land, and they could go in there and select.
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What that obviously meant was there was going to be a huge amount of land tied up for Native selections that might – would, in fact, would - not just might - would -- go back to the federal government, or be made available for state selection, or whatever. So there was … that led to a lot of politics, I might … I might say. So, what you’ve got here is that plus these red lines which demark the regional corporation’s boundaries. There were 12 regional corporations in the state of Alaska, and the allowance for a 13th region, which was at the choice of all the people that lived out of Alaska but were eligible Alaska Natives that wanted to incorporate into a 13th region. One of the other big deals about the Native Claims Settlement Act, which has come into play over and over and over again, were provisions that … that tried to work out some kind of a resolution between the haves and have-nots.
Everybody knew that there were certain of these regions that were going to be far wealthier than other regions. For instance, the North Slope Natives were … were setting up here with this potential oil and gas basin here, and potential oil and gas here. Whereas the Yukon Delta -- which was a very low quality, secondary basin for oil and gas, and where there’s over one third of the Natives of the state live, out here, in 55 villages -- they were probably … they couldn’t even find a Korean company that was interested in coming and making toothpicks out of their black spruce. Their economic possibilities were just pretty minimal, is what I’m saying. So they knew that when they … when they settled the Act.
And so what they … what they tried to do in the law, was to figure out mechanisms where there would be kind of a sharing arrangement. So one of the things that’s required in the law is that when a corporation - regional corporation - develops its land resources, 70% of what they get from that is shared among all the other regions and only 30% comes to the home region. And boy, that has caused some interesting stuff.
There’s also sharing between allocations; between the regional corporations and the village corporations. The money comes through the regional corporations, so they actually get it, and then they allocate it down, according to what the law says. The idea was they wanted to give some amount of money - direct benefit - to the individual Natives, because they do live in … in pretty severe poverty, according to our standards. I’m not sure they’ve necessarily felt that poverty entirely. But … but anytime somebody comes with a greenback, you’ll probably take it. So they wanted some money to go down, but they didn’t want to burn up the whole 967.5 million. So they had a filtering system there, with some of the money to be invested and some of it to go on down. All that is played out under what you see here.
The other main thing that you see here is that the … this was considered a very important area both in oil and gas standpoint, and then also, its relationship to the Bearing Sea, which is also believed to be a major oil and gas basin. And so this is where the facilities would be probably be sited. And for that reason the … the state laid a whole bunch of selections down there at a very early date.
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NO – We’re down to one minute on this first cassette.
BR – Ok. Well, I’ll end it by saying, in January, right after the Act passed, the state tried to lay down 42 million acres of land selections. And they said they were eligible to do that because this 90 day freeze that the Act put on them had to have a delay. The DOI, of course, argued against that. And it was eventually settled in 1972. But it was settled only because the Department didn’t want the state just blowing this whole thing out of the water for years and years as we went through a lawsuit. Not because there was any chance that they were actually going to win it. But they did end up giving them some of the selections that they asked for, and that’s what you see … that’s why you see some of these new areas show up. Ok?
NO – Ok.
End of Tape #1, first set of tapes.
[Although the interview on the second set of tapes is identical for the most part to the first set, there is a small amount of conversation on the tail end of second set of tapes that is additional to what was on the first set. It is included here. This conversation blends into the start of Tape #2 of the first set.]
BR – How is that going? Is that the sort of thing you want?
NO – Exactly! It’s perfect.
?? – Well, we can keep doing that. You’ve got …
NO – Oh, yeah. No, this is … this is exactly what I was hoping for, so … and you know it much better than anyone else here, that’s …
[indecipherable, far off conversation, map noise]
BR – I know that I’m jumping past some of my stuff and then having to come back and try to pick it up. I’ll … I think I’ve got … au … I missed the 900 million dollars. Ok. Well, we’ve actually changed the maps since … since the moment ago, but this then is a March 1972 map …
Start of Tape 2, first set of tapes. End of DVD #1
BR – … which shows one of the things that the Secretary was able to do. As I said, everybody seemed to hit the ground running. The Natives probably had the worst of it, because they didn’t really understand a lot of the things that they had to do.
But state certainly hit the ground running. They had been monitoring all their stuff, and they wanted a whole bunch of things. And so, in January of ‘72, they laid down
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a whole bunch of selections. And … and the … of course the Secretary refused them. But then the state turned right around and went into court and filed a lawsuit. And the only problem with the lawsuit … I was … I was in there and all the conversations and the discussions and the analyses that went on. And there was almost no way that the state was going to prevail in a court of law. The … the Act was clear. The mandate from the Congress, the power of the Congress to do what it did, all of those things were extremely clear. And there was a 90 day freeze placed on all the lands in Alaska -- by the Congress. It was an extension of the … of the Udall land freeze -- the last one he put in place in 1969, which said that there won’t be an oil transportation system until the Native Claims Act gets done. And tried to freeze it at just the … the state selections at that time, which were … oh, somewhere less than 20 million acres. I think it was somewhere around 16 to 20 million acres, at the time that the Statehood Act … I mean, the Claims Act passed. Then they came in with [End of Tape #1, second set of tapes.] 42 million acres of selections and were demanding that, or they were going to stop the whole thing.
And so, in the settlement that came out and it took from … they filed their lawsuit, I think, in April of ‘72, and it took ‘till September to work out an agreement. But the agreement that they worked out took them out of … of some of the national interest areas that were going to be studied for parks and refuges. It took them out of many of the Native areas that they were to be in conflict. And it allowed them in to some areas that they wanted very badly. So, you see on this map some new state areas in blue.
And there three shades of blue. There’s the dark blue, which is ‘patented’ land. There’s the intermediate blue, which is ‘Tentatively Approved,’ which is one step of movement by the federal government, which accepts the state land selection, goes through and makes a preliminary check of the records and files, at the Bureau of Land Management, and determines that there’s only conflict with other land selection rights and so forth, in these specified areas, and therefore moves this into a category waiting only for the state to say ‘we want you to patent that block of lands right there.’ That’s … and to make a final determination about conflicts with other entries. So TA lands – ‘Tentatively Approved’ - are believed to be at a stage where the state can actually take certain actions.
For instance, these were ‘Tentatively Approved’ lands at the time of the oil well was discovered, and that … the leasing that went on right after the oil well … there was a huge lease sale, that uses all these dark blue lands up here, in 1969, in which the state … and here’s a state that its total state product - net state product, or gross state product – actually, I think it was the gross state product, for 1968 - was 1.2 billion dollars. In January of 1969, they had a lease sale on the North Slope - up here - that brought in 900 million dollars -- in cash.
You can imagine what some of the Alaskans were feeling about that moment in time. So … but those were only ‘Tentatively Approved.’ And so there could have been a challenge against whether ‘Tentatively Approved’ was good enough for them to do all that or whether there was some kind of a residual federal ownership or
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national interest or whatever. So they wanted that patented to them. And that’s why it went to patent, because of that filing, and the selec… and the settlement. And some of these other lands that they wanted, particularly down in this area, again, were areas that were either of interest for them from an economic oil and gas / fisheries / port siteing / on shore support facilities, things of that nature, around the state. And … and they could have complicated … again, the lawsuit that they filed could have meant that the entire Native Claims Act had to be delayed for 2 to 4 years. Well, you know, that just wasn’t going to work. So the Secretary settled with the state of Alaska.
Also by this … by this … all these action that were going on, it was decided that the Secretary had better move quicker, rather than waiting and doing it slower. In the law, he was supposed to take up to 9 months before he needed to identify and withdraw the so called 17 D2 lands, which was shortened in everybody’s lexicon to ‘D2.’ So when anybody says ‘D2’ in Alaska they all know what it means, but what it refers to is Section 17 (d) (2) of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. And he had until September 18th of 1972 to make his decisions, based on what the agencies were bringing forward, and based on policy decisions. And then make the … the withdrawals. And then the studies could get underway.
And they had … they had a fairly short time to make the studies, but they had to make recommendations by January 18, 1973. So it was a fairly short time frame. And it covered a huge amount of land -- 80 million acres is no small chunk of land. But what the Secretary did was, on March 9th 1972, right after … right before, actually, but the effect … effective date was the publication date in the Federal Register which was March 20th I think … it was 19th or 20th … ok, so it was like … one day after the freeze was over by the Act, he put a land withdrawal down on 80 million acres of D2 lands, 47.5 million acres of D1 lands, and withdrew all the Native deficiency lands, which was another 45 million acres. So he actually withdrew, in March - he signed the orders on the 9th, and it was published in the Federal Register, as I said, one day after the freeze - on about 160 / 170 million acres around the state of Alaska, which just about blew the state … state away.
But, it gave the Natives the initial deficiency areas identified for them. It gave them an opportunity to discuss that with the Secretary. And there will be adjustments that you’ll see when he makes his final adjustments in September. And it … it meant that the state was gonna have to come to terms with all of that. So, there will be changes, even though, technically, if you read the Act, there shouldn’t have been all of this adjustment going on. But the various pushing, shoving, and so forth, was inevitable I think. And in the milieu of all of that, here you have the staffs, very small staffs I think … it by … by this time, in Anchorage, you had about 4 people in the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife Area Office working, somewhat ad hock, under the Refuge Supervisor.
NO – Would that have included Clay … Clay Hardy?
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BR – This would have included Clay Hardy. Clay was up there, and had been involved in things like the Amchitka atomic bomb test. And they had people from the wilderness staff -- Marv Plenert, who was up there … and a couple of other people. And then they had people like Dr. Calvin Lensink, who was actually the Refuge Manager at the Clarence Rhode National Wildlife Refuge. And they had Jim King, who was the waterfowl biologist, pilot / biologist for the state … for the Bureau, and had flown all the waterfowl surveys throughout the state. And these were the kinds of people that they had pulled together to identify interest areas and to put the basic, raw, resource information into … into packets.
And so, I mentioned that, by January, we had one packet that was about 160 pages. And that was turned into another packet in July. And then it was turned into a third packet by September. So there were three major efforts, each one of them upgrading the information and honing it down a little bit, in preparation for taking the next step.
‘Cause the other thing that had happened … external force that had happened along the way, was in 1969 … in the latter part of 1969, the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA] passed. We’d never had the National Environmental Policy Act before that.
And the National Environmental Policy Act caught a couple of very important projects. And one of them it caught was the pipeline. ‘Cause the pipeline was asked … they asked for the right of way in July of 1969. Then the Act passed shortly thereafter, and they didn’t want to have to do what was, you know, an EIS. And nobody knew what that was at the time. But they didn’t want to have to do that. They thought they could get around it.
And the first trial they … they did an 8 page document that they called an environmental impact statement and … and I don’t think it was that precise document, I think it was the next document after that one was rejected - sort of out of hand, then they went back and did another quick and dirty document. And that was taken to court by the Wilderness Society, by one Mister Harry Crandell, whose name I mentioned to you.
Harry Crandell -- I’ll just briefly give you a bio on him. Harry Crandell … at the time Larry Means went to Washington and the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife into the Branch of Planning, Harry Crandell was the Chief of the Branch of Planning for the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. Harry Crandell got very upset with events in 1969, inside the Bureau. Specifically, for the record, he was upset by the way Director John Gottschalk was treated and ousted from his Directorship, and moved aside, and Spencer Smith was put in as Director. And Harry just thought that was an outrage. And he quit. And he went to the Wilderness Society and started working on public land issues at the Wilderness Society. And then shortly thereafter, in the early ‘70s, right about the time this passed … the Native Claims Act passed … he went up to the Hill. And worked on first, the Public Lands Committee at the House under Chairman Melcher, and then, when Chairman Udall
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put together his oversight and Alaska Lands Subcommittee, he brought Harry on as his Staff Director.
So here is an ex-Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, ex-Refuge Manager, ex-planner, very involved with … and understanding of the Bureaus affairs, setting up there as the Chief of Staff on this important committee.
Now, of course, there’s also a jurisdictional thing to take consideration of, because it comes to play over and over again. And that is: the Interior Committee doesn’t have jurisdiction over the National Wildlife Refuge System or the Fish & Wildlife Service. Merchant Marine and Fisheries [does], specifically the Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation … and John Dingle.
And John Dingle was involved in the Native Claims Act, and in the provisions in the Native Claims Act. Specifically, the provisions in the miscellaneous section that protected refuges, that only allowed the Natives that were within or near a refuge to take up to three townships out of that refuge.
In the parks you couldn’t take any land out -- no matter what. But in the refuges, originally they were going to be able to take whatever they wanted to. State lands -- they were going to be able to take whatever they wanted to. Both of those two land categories, in the final Native Claims Act, were modified so that in the case, as I said, the Native villages in or right adjacent existing national wildlife refuges, depending on population, could take up to three townships of land out of that national wildlife refuge. And the same thing was true about the state. They couldn’t take it out of patented land, but out of TAed land, or just selected land, they could take three townships - out of Native lan… state lands. And in the case of the refuges, one of the provisions – again, John Dingle - whatever they took out was to be replaced.
And so there was a provision in Section 22E that said that all lands removed from a national wildlife refuge had to be replaced. And so we were also trying to identify what they called 22E replacement lands through this process. And I’ll point them out in a minute. Which was a very unusual thing, and … and it actually brought down a lot of animosity, both within the Interior Department -- other agencies -- and in Natives and in some other places, both in limitation and replacement provision. The Forest Service lost land, but they didn’t have a replacement provision, for instance. So they were a little bit upset about that. But, all of these laws, the Statehood Act, the Native Claims Act, the resulting Act, these were all compromise situations, and there are provisions in there that you have to wonder sometimes, where did this come from and why. But in this case, I can tell you the where it came from and the why. John Dingle was protecting his turf and his national wildlife refuges, which he feels very, very covetous of, even today, at his advanced age.
So, there were these kinds of things. And when the … when the bells started moving, and the Congress started getting involved, Dingle made sure he got his oar in the water. In 1972, while this was going on, John Dingle introduced the first bill
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making refuges all over the state of Alaska -- big huge swaths of areas. Very few people know about, but he had a bill that he put in. He called it a … the National Wildlife Refuge Act, that included these giant areas in Alaska. And that Act also had an organic provision for the whole refuge system, that moved the refuge system out of the Fish & Wildlife Service and set it all up in a different configuration than what you know of to be today. So Dingle was playing … playing games. And I can also say that Harry B. Crandell, this little guy that came out of the planning division and went to the Wilderness Society and then went up on the Hill, wrote that law for … for John Dingle. That’s how it got to be so knowledgeable. And … and Harry had certain ideas about what ought to happen to the refuge system. And he convinced John Dingle that it ought to happen, and so he helped write that provision, too.
NO – That’s really interesting to know, because, you know, you look at things today, and everything starts with Udall and HR 39, and that’s … no references have I ever seen to this.
BR – Yeah. Nah. There were … there were a number of laws … bills, not laws … number of bills put in, and Dingle just happened to get out there first. He wanted to make sure that everybody understood he had jurisdiction over the refuges. So we had … and we had full knowledge of that. I can tell you that we were constantly reminded, ‘cause I would get calls from the Merchant Marine and Fisheries staff all the time. Larry would get calls, and so on. And … and they were … they were maintaining that they were going to fight for jurisdiction. And it ultimately became a fight.
Ok. So, the … the idea was that wherever we had these little red dots next to units like Clarence Rhode … and that there were 13 villages that were eligible to select lands from within the Clarence Rhode National Refuge alone. So, 13 times 3 is 39 townships, times 22 … 22 … 22 thousand … 23 thousand and 40 acres, is a lot of land, to be taken out of these refuges.
The very dark green, which is darker even than this, which is the D2 land, the darkest green here that you see, are areas that we identified that were to be considered for replacement of 1.8 million acres that was going to be lost to the refuge system to village corporations under the Act. So that was a provision that very few people know about because, the way the thing finally cranked out, ultimately, the 22E lands became somewhat moot. They became very moot. But … we … we … we fought for them. And we did a whole lot of work over the years putting out regulations, and making land withdrawals, and doing all kinds of things.
So the darker green is the D2 lands. That should be similar to those interest areas that I mentioned on the other map.
And then the light green are the so called D1 public interest areas. The light green are … are actually quite well protected … in … in the sense that they … in both the case of the D1 lands and the D2 lands, they were using brand new authority that was granted in the Alaskan Native Claims Act. It was authority that the Secretary
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never had before. And … and it gave them many unusual features. I don’t think I need to go into them particularly, but the D2 lands were timed, that was one thing. The D1 were going to be indefinite. In fact, there are still lands all over Alaska that are underlaying federal lands that had a D1 land withdrawal protective mechanism laying in there somewhere like a … like a film of a … of a … of Mylar on top of the land.
The … these withdrawal areas that were pink and white were using authority … the white particularly, are authorities that were in the Bill. Those were general public land laws, and they used those authorities. So they have a slightly different nature to them. Although, I believe that the Secretary put D1 land withdrawals under every one of them in March of … of a … of a 1972. So there’s even a layer there.
There’s this theory within the Solicitors Office in Interior that you never know what’s gonna come down the road, so, therefore, whenever you have an opportunity, you don’t just put a single land withdrawal down, you put layers of land withdrawals. And then somebody that wants to get in there and do bad things to you, has got to peel each of these layers away. And each one becomes pretty arduous to do. And it was that kind of thing that eventually saved the … Barrier Islands on the Artic National Wildlife Range, later on.
And then some of the protection that’s been given to the NPRA [Naval Petroleum Reserves Area?], but … it’s very … it’s an important concept, that I never knew anything about before I went in and started working on these things.
Well, back to NEPA. NEPA was … ultimately they … the … the pipeline companies lost. They did … they hadn’t done anything close to what had to be done for an environmental impact statement. And I think they ultimately ended up with a nine volume impact statement. I don’t remember how many pages that was, but it was it started out at eight pages in the first submission, and then it kept growing and growing. And after the court case -- it got huge. And I don’t know how much money they spent on it. But that’s what it took to get the environmental considerations. And all I can say is, having looked at it very, very, very, very closely from inside, contemporaneously, and also looking back on it, I sure am glad that that happened, because when they first started testifying on the pipeline, they were making claims that their engineers knew everything that needed to be known about permafrost, about construction, and … and development, etc. etc., and that there was not going to be any problem.
Well, they claimed, at that time, Norm, that they were going to put this pipeline into the ground. And they were going to bury and insulate this pipeline, except for maybe, about 30 to 40 miles, of the 800 mile corridor. So, if that … that should tell anybody that knows anything about the final product, or anything about permafrost, and the conditions that they had to go through, and the serious nature of some of the things that had to be done, such as earthquake control, all the stream crossings, body and … you know, the caribou access, and so forth, that … they ended up … I doubt if there is 32 miles of buried pipeline -- or much more than that. Because
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they really didn’t know. And if it hadn’t been for the environmental impact statement, where they actually had to go out and deal with experts, and the universities, and outside of universities -- USGS, and some other places, they would have never … I mean, the pipeline would have been a disaster.
In a relative sense, it’s worked fairly well.
It’s getting a little bit scary now, because it’s wearing out.
But … but in terms of what they actually, finally built with all the monitoring and everything that went on … But anybody that believes that the environmentalists and the people, the professional biologists and so forth, were scaremongering, only needs to look at the changes that came about from 1969 / ‘70, when they first went in and testified.
And I have those hearings. And I actually reviewed them the other night, just preparing for this. And, it’s almost scary what they were saying that they knew, and so forth, in those hearings, at that time. So, lot of changes came about.
It also caught us, caught all the agencies. We were going to do these land withdrawals, and we were going to do all these parks and refuges and stuff. But guess what, we had to write environmental impact statements. And … this was early in the game, so, some things got away.
But most of it … even the Rampart Canyon got caught a little bit. It didn’t do a full fledged environmental impact statement, but it put out a huge series of documents that … that revealed, you know, some of the really dire aspects of what would happen if they went ahead and … and put that dam in down here, and flood 10,500 square miles of land, put it under water. And what was gonna happed in there with the 4 foot annual fluctuation and … and so on and so forth. And the devastation on … particularly waterfowl resources, was awesome. But also, all the subsistence resources that this … this is a huge subsistence resource, and as I said, 4000 to 5000 people would have their homes and all of their territory and their identity just … removed from them. So it was a very awesome … very awesome thing.
Well, to get back a little bit more on track. Here we are in March of 1972 … that this withdrawal was laid down right at … the day after the freeze let up. And, again, I think there was … you’ll see through this whole thing, there was a huge effort within the Department of Interior and the agencies that were involved, trying to get this information out -- not only to the Natives, but to the state, and anybody else that was interested. So, even the ‘map on the floor’ gang that was growing out of the … of the coalition of forces in the conservation community, which started with the development of an Alaska Conservation Society. Of … it jelled around this whole event, is what it boiled down to. They didn’t have one before. And they started up because this thing was in the mill. And … and even in … even while we were doing our work, and trying to get ahead of the ballgame, they were up there doing their work. And … and as early as January, the Alaska Conversation Society actually sent
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a team of people – delegation – in to see the Secretary, carrying all this big thick volume of material, saying ‘here’s where you ought to be looking for this Park and here’s where you ought to be looking for that Refuge and this Wild and Scenic River and so on.’
And … and interestingly enough, at least to me, and I … and I’m not going to try to … to second guess, and evaluate the rights and wrongs of it, but, a lot of their sources were, in fact, agency people. Who worked after hours, and on weekends, on their own time, and took their expertise to pour into this Alaska conservation organization, and help them put together another … another pressure point -- another movement if you will -- to try to make this huge, one of a kind, never-before-and-never-again, planning exercise into something as meaningful as we could, so that it was really, truly, based on resource values, rather than pure politics. And I think, you know, I’m not even gonna say that politics didn’t get in here, but I will say there was a huge amount of resource values and resource information and judgments based on that, that fought back and forth and over the table and around the corner, to try to make this thing actually be resource based. And I think we … we won a few victories in that … in that effort.
[Lots of map / paper noise]
So, let’s go to the next map it’s not quite the ‘map on the floor group’ but there was … was just slightly above that in elevation. Now I’ve gone and put it back together ….
[Lots of map / paper noise]
The other nice thing about these maps is, you notice they’ve got a little bit more user friendly in terms of tone and the colors and stuff. That last one was kind of glaring. And now, here, they … they’ve knocked the tones back a little bit. By the way, as an aside, I don’t know how … whether that thing is picking it up or not but it … it sees these little squares and they said there’re 23,040 acres - a township. And if you get a little bit closer, you can see the map is just covered with those little squares. There are 2200 of those little squares inside it - the state of Alaska. And the state of Alaska is a huge piece of … almost a subcontinent unto itself. And if you … if you actually take the state of Alaska, and lay it on top of the United States of America, at the same scale, this area right here would be right off shore of North Carolina … South Carolina, right at … around Savannah and the Savannah River Delta. This area here would be up at International Falls, Minnesota. And this end of the Aleutian Islands, out there, Attu -- where we fought the battle for … in WWII, would be setting right off the edge of California, in Santa Barbara.
So I … I only bring that up, not to brag about the size of the state, ‘cause I don’t … I’ve never lived in that state. But I bring it up because the logistical problems that we encountered, and everybody else encountered … I would say particularly the Natives, because of the lack of resources to do this … but, the travel - and other logistical things that you had to go through - to even try to understand, and then
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cope with, that kind of dimension -- 378 million acres: 3 times the size of California; more than 2 times the size of size of Texas. And you try to deal with that kind of magnitude, in a milieu such as I’ve been trying to describe, and it adds an enormous complexity to the whole situation. But it took … that’s why I say, it took me a while. I started going in, in January of … ’72, and reading the Act, and reading NEPA, and reading the refuge law, and reading all these other things, and becoming familiar with it.
But I never went to the state of Alaska. I, you know, everything I had was all there in paper, in front of me, and so forth. But I did get a mental image that I was talking about a big area, I can tell you that. But, it … in terms of just travel … and, of course, at the time, you know, we were working on this, Alaska had time zones that we don’t have up there today. So, at the time the only area in Alaska that was on the same time zone as … as a southern 48 state, which was Pacific Standard Time, was here at … at Juneau. Anchorage was 2 hours behind Pacific Standard Time and Bethel, Alaska was 4 hours behind. And Attu was actually in an Asian time zone. So, there were the time zone problems. I can remember getting up at midnight / one o’clock, when I finally did go up to Alaska, when I was trying to call back in and check into my office, getting up in the Bethel hotel and … at midnight, both because it took them to get to the phone, because the phone … was only one phone there and you have to get into this big long queue to get to the phone, but then … so I could call back to the DC office early in the morning and get the early morning events and so forth.
And then, the time to travel and … and the cost and the type of travel equipment that you had to have in order to do it. You don’t just get in an automobile and go zip around these little refuge proposals and say ‘well, well, we’ll do this and we’ll do that.’ You fly over them for hours at a time and then … and then you go back and try to put it together, mentally on a map, and figure it all out. It … we did put teams on the ground. And that was what we were working toward as each one of these exercises went its own way. But, by the time they got out there, we knew we were talking about areas that were known to be very important to the various kinds of resources that we were intended to protect.
And the debate … and debates between the agencies, because we found, right from the start, that the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife was interested in a number of areas that the Park Service was also interested in. and then when the Forest Service put its teams together, we suddenly found ourselves faced with, in fact, 42 million acres of national forest interest areas that overlapped with … I don’t remember what our total was, but we had various totals at various times that went as high as 80 million or 90 million acres of interest areas for the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. And then we also conflicted with the Park Service on about 40 million acres. And they conflicted with the Forest Service on a certain amount area. And then, there was the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation and the Wild and Scenic Rivers, which wasn’t really a conflict, because if they were inside of another one … another agencies proposal, it was going to be managed by that agency. If it
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wasn’t, it was going to be BLM managed. So, they were the only ones that didn’t really have any conflict resolution to take care of.
But, it meant … it meant my first exposure to … to really serious, confrontational level, disagreements and bantering between individual agency people. Not necessarily at the upper most levels, ‘cause they’ve got a little more civil. But at the staff level, it got pretty intense at times. And I think as a result of that, as well as a desire on the part of people like Assistant Secretary Nathanial Reed and his staff, and even Secretary Rogers Morton, to try to … to end up with a … with a recommendation package that … that had the muscle of multiple agencies going forward with linked arms, saying ‘we all agree to this and this is what we want.’ Rather than having the Park Service go up and say ‘we want all these areas,’ and then have the Bureau go up and say ‘we want all these areas.’ And then have the Congress and their staff say ‘wait a minute, there’s all of this area that you both want … what … how are we supposed to make the decision.’ They wanted to try to do it at home before they went up there; and … and also because we were going to have to do these environmental impact statements [EISs]. It suddenly became recognized that there needed to be mechanisms put in place to allow some coming together in some early resolution. There was going to be fights, but they would be resolved at a fairly early state.
So, although the agencies went pretty much their own way throughout 1972, by January of ‘73 it had gotten to the point where it fairly obvious there were serious discussions and disagreements. For instance, the Fish & Wildlife wanted the north side of the Seward Peninsula; and the Park Service wanted the north side of the Seward Peninsula. and … and it was causing consternation and … and frankly, it was keeping us from getting on doing some of the work that needed to be done as we were trying to do these battles. Each time we went in to make a presentation to a policy level person, you know, there was this shoving with the elbows … this sort of thing – mentally, if not otherwise.
So, in January of 1973 Secretary Nat Reed, Assistant Secretary Nat Reed, established within his arm what he called an Alaska Planning Group. And Alaska Planning Group was comprised of the US Fish & Wildlife Service, which had not by six … it didn’t become Fish & Wildlife Service ‘till ‘74, but I’ll use it starting here, it was still the Bureau in ‘73, but Fish & Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. Later … even later that year, it also took on adjunct teams from US Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management … but not anybody else. So we ended up with 5 agencies trying to work together at one time. But, by then we had been working together, in one form or fashion, at least in coordinating our presentations and putting together various kinds of paperwork. And the policy makers kinda wanted to see things that were done similarly. So they didn’t want to see a particular format used by the Park Service and then suddenly have to deal with something completely cockeyed and different from … from the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. So they forced us into unifying our materials and so on and so forth.
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This actually caused more consternation in Alaska than it did down in DC, ‘cause up there the offices did work separately, in their own offices. They did go talk to each other and stuff, but when it came to deciding that there were going to be materials submitted in a certain exact format and this is what it was going to be, and it used elements that they knew came out of the Park system, it cause the people in Fish & Wildlife to get a little bit upset about it. And the same thing happened over in the Park system, where it used a lot of stuff out of the resource value columns of the Fish & Wildlife Service. So, you know, we went through all those things. I … you know … just clear and deadly … there were … there were serious confrontations in the first couple of years. But, it started resolving itself as we worked our way through.
By middle year 1973, I had been in and out of Washington, DC, somewhere between 6 and 8 times. Each time for a minimum of two weeks and a maximum of about 4 weeks. So, I had spent a considerable amount of time. My job was Regional Biologist for the National Wildlife Refuges in Region 2, Albuquerque. My boss … bosses were very lenient, because they kept getting calls from the then Directors of the Fish & Wildlife Service saying ‘we’ve got to have this … we’ve gotta … I mean he’s read the law and he’s done this, and he’s done that, and so we can’t start somebody new, you’ve got to send him back.’ But I had pretty heavy duties in that Regional Biologist job that I was also responsible for, and I was trying to fill them back and forth. But, frankly, the … you know … as you continue down the pathway, you become kind of caught up in it, because here was an opportunity that you could see wasn’t going to happen anywhere else in a lifetime or career. So, here was something that was really worth trying to do something good about it -- and an opportunity to do it. So I wasn’t … I wasn’t totally kicking and screaming, but, you know, I also wasn’t always happy to … at the time that they said they needed me, to go in there to do it. But, I was doing it.
By mid-July they said look ‘why don’t you just come on in and … and take this position in the national wildlife refuge division’ which was population biologist specialist … wildlife population specialist … ‘and we’ll put you on loan to Larry Means over in Alaska Group until they finish that up sometime this fall, and then you come back and work in refuges.’ And I said ‘ok, I think I can do that.’ And my personal life allowed that to happen about that time. So, in a … July … mid-July … July 18th I think, I reported for duty in Washington, DC, full time, GS 13 biologist … Fish & Wildlife biologist.
And … and low and behold, I think within a week, I was told that I was going to become what they called the Coordinator for the K Street Environmental Impact Statement Operation. They had decided, after getting in some preliminary draft EIS’s and materials from each of the agencies in Alaska, and reviewing them on proposals as they were evolving at that time, the policy group, both in the Task Force - Alaska Task Force - at the Secretary’s level, and with Nat Reed and his Alaska Planning Group, had decided this is not going to work. There is no way that we can have these things prepared: in Alaska by those teams; mailed down here; presented; nit picked; and so on and so forth.
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And I might add, this was a time before technology. When we … when I first got into this and all the way through 1973, all of this material was being prepared on IBM Selectric typewriters. And the most technology we had was you could change the little ball and get interesting fonts. But other than that … and the Xerox machines were somewhat limited. And they had almost no fax capability at all. There was one fax machine on … in US Fish & Wildlife Service, and that was it. And some of the Reg… the Area Offices didn’t have … the Area Office in Alaska didn’t have a fax machine. And the telephone was … worked the old fashioned way. And so on. So, this stuff would often times come in with a lot of typographical errors just because of the pressure of … of the business and stuff. And … and that meant that the whole thing had to be retyped – completely. And then that had to be reviewed, and edited again. And sometimes it would take two or three times to get all of the errors resolved. ‘Cause sometimes you’d take it to a tired typewriter … typist and they would give you more errors that you got … than you took to them. In the new version. So, anyway, this got bad. But, anyway, I was supposed to become the Coordinator of K Street, which meant that I was supposed to go up to an office outside of the Interior building, right in the middle of ‘Lobby Town, USA,’ on K Street -- 1717 K Street.
There was a federal commission that was going out of business, being dissolved, and they had a bunch of office space up there. And the Alaska Planning Group had a high enough priority, by this time, that they … we took over the space. We actually almost pushed those poor people out of their offices. ‘Cause they had a few remaining staff trying to tie up business and we were flooding in there with all of our maps and pieces of paper and everything. But I ended up … I was directly supervising the core staff for the creation of 28 environmental impact statements, 28 initial master plan / development plans, and some brochures and other documents, to use to portray what these recommendations were all about. I was responsible for the typing staff, the graphics staff, the support staff necessary to do the printing and publishing. And I dealt with all contracting and general services, and the printer operation down in the Department of Interior, and several other departments. By the time we got 28 impact statements going, we were using printers in every department we could get into.
And then I had, not really reporting to me, but sort of dependent upon me and these office spaces, a Fish & Wildlife Service team, and Park Service team, a Forest Service team, the BLM and the BOR never actually put a team up there, but they did put individuals up there from time to time. And they each had their own little spaces, down around these corridors. And they had their own groups of writers. And they had … they varied from three or four writers and some editors … and I had an editorial staff too, that reported to me … three or four writers, all the way up to, at times I think the big teams would get up to 15 writers, sitting in there working away.
The operation almost immediately became a 24 hour a day, all the time operation. The offices were always open. People could come whenever they wanted to work
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on things. some of these guys would write and work for 8 or 10 hours, go get two or three hours of sleep, and then come back to K Street, and write and write and write. And I was also responsible … that’s where I grew some power … I was responsible for taking these things … they would send a person with me from the writing staff, but I was the one that negotiated with the Environmental Project Review Office in the Department of Interior, which gave us direct support of editing, and reviewing, and clearing, each of our environmental impact statements. And we started that operation the first part of August of 1973 and the deadline was December 18th 1973, wherein the Act said you have to send proposals to the Hill.
They had actually selected a Coordinator 10 days before I got to Washington, from the National Park Service. And from … he was from their Anchorage office. And he came in and spent a week looking the situation over, and then resigned. He didn’t resign from the Park Service, but he resigned from K Street. And he said ‘there is no way on earth that … that that can be done, and … and I am not gonna take … subject my career to that kind of failure, good by.’ And so he left. I didn’t … I didn’t actually know that until I’d been up there for 3 or 4 weeks. And God, I wish I was smarter. Anyway, I sort of looked at it and said ‘well, you know, I’ve never done anything, and never seen the Fish & Wildlife Service take on anything, that they couldn’t find a way to get it done.’ So, I told them, I said, ‘one caveat -- you get me the policy level decisions on these documents in a timely fashion, and I will get them delivered as you … as you want.’
Now that’s … that sounds fairly simple, but gets a little more complicated, and we’ll get into that.
But, nevertheless, they didn’t get me very timely decisions, I will say that. Some of the decisions were, in fact, still being made on … on the 1st of December, or a week before the 1st of December. And then some of them got changed on the 2nd or 3rd of December, or something like that. But, anyway, starting from scratch … we started … the teams could write the materials, but, I mean … here were biologists and economists, geologists, park planners, landscape architects, river specialists, foresters, engineers … you know, really talented, bright people, working their little buns off. Who were trying to learn what an environmental impact statement required, in the way of writing and analyzing and … and visualizing impacts. And our team, for instance, the Fish & Wildlife Service team, started off saying ‘look, we wear white hats, we do nothing but good things, I mean, the impacts are all rosy, hunky dory, wonderful things.’ And they went up to the Environmental Project Review with some documents that kind of said that, and the Environmental Project Review put big red X’s all over the paper and sent it back down and said ‘this won’t do.’ So …
NO – Is this John Ferrell and his group that was …
BR – This was John Ferrell. It was … John was the Project Officer. He reported to a fellow by the name of Bruce Blanchard. Bruce Blanchard was the equivalent of an Assistant Secretary, really. He was the Director of Environmental Project Review,
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but that was a big post when they set it up. So, yeah, I dealt with John and … and I dealt with Bruce, whenever I wanted to appeal John, which I tried a couple of times. And … and I tried to remain … in my job, I couldn’t afford to get too territorial, because I had parks, and I had all these other people. We had to get this stuff through, in some timely fashion. I had a lot of other things going on, I can tell you, trying to get the printers all lined up and the contracts written and so forth.
And again, we were stuck with the Selectric typewriters. And I only had three secretaries setting in K Street Operations. I had three secretaries, I had three editors, and one of the editors was a very senior Park Service editor, fellow by the name of John Bosberg. When he first went up there, they gave him the job of senior editor and advisor, and they put him in my office. Right in my office. His desk was right in front of my desk. And this developed … what … within two weeks, developed into a near catastrophe. John would set there and listen to my telephone conversation with a wide variety of people and things, from dealing with the Area Office in Alaska to dealing with the Park Service down in DC, or the Forest Service, or the printing office, or whatever. He would set there and listen to my conversation, and this conversation, on the telephone. Not having any idea what was coming from the other end of the line. And then run down to the Interior Department and report on that to the Chairman of the Alaska Planning Group.
And, I don’t remember what the specific thing was, but at … at one point, he went down and reported a conversation I’d had with the Area Office in Anchorage -- Fish & Wildlife Service, that seemed to indicate that I was just undercutting the Park Service every step of the way, and that, you know, that I was favoring the Fish & Wildlife folks, and so on and so forth. I think I was probably trying to solve a spat and I was trying to sound like I would go try to smooth it over and stuff. I don’t remember. But, in any event, he went down and reported that, and suddenly I’m on the carpet in front of the Chairman of the Alaska Planning Group. Who was, by the way, a wonderful man, truly knowledgeable about Alaska, and he was an Assistant Director for Planning in the National Park system, GS 16. I was a GS 13 – barely.
Fish & Wildlife component at the APG [Alaska Planning Group] consisted of Lynn Greenwalt, who was, at the time he was put on the Alaska Planning Group, Chief of Refuges for the Fish & Wildlife Service. Larry Means -- Robert L. Means, was his Alternate. Did all the work. Suffered all the slings and arrows. And had me as sort of on detail from now and then, and some other people who would come in from various places, including Alaska, to work with him on trying to get all the work done. The Park Service had a team that I added up the other day and there were 9 people at one time in the Park Service Washington team. It was sort of an uneven balance of power there. And BOR had one person working on it. BLM had a Division of Lands that was responsible for all of this land stuff in Alaska. And … and … and they were pretty bitter because they were loosing all this land and they wanted an oar in the water and it wasn’t being given to them. And then the Forest Service got into it, and they felt like we were going to just screw them. So they didn’t even want to come to K Street. But they finally did.
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Anyway, the upshot of it was, after they had read me the riot act, I sat down and told them ‘look here’s what happened, here’s what was said. I want John out of my office.’ I said ‘I … I can not work with somebody setting there listening to one half of a conversation and … and then coming down here and having you get all upset, when there’s noth… you know, it was innocent.’ But I said, ‘I don’t want to have to come down here and defend myself two of three times a week. I just refused to do that. So, if you want me to remain as K Street Coordinator, John gets out of my office.’ And he said ‘well, you’ll have to talk to John about that.’
So I … I didn’t talk to John. John went home on Friday night, as he usually did, at five o’clock. We picked up his desk and moved it. And we moved it in … we moved it in with the other editors, where he really belonged. And when he came back to work on Monday, his desk was down there. And he was upset. But, he couldn’t pick up the desk and move it back, so, therefore, I finally got him out of my office.
But that was the sort of expediting that needed to be done if we were gonna continue to move ahead. I was in there … my … my normal day at K Street started at about 4:30 and it would run until about 10:30 that night. What was I doing at 4:30? At 4:30 I would come through the Department of Interior main building, and go to about a dozen different offices in the Interior Department, and pick up these little stacks of paper, that were sometimes 2 inches and sometimes 1 inch, whatever, because we had an entire work force of women in the Department who would serve as typists. What was I doing at 10:30? At 10:30 I was picking up all the written materials from all the teams and carrying it down to Interior -- sometimes earlier than that, 8:00 / 7:00 -- and handing it out to all of these typists, and finding out how much they thought they were going to be able to work that night, and giving them all this material. So I would then collect it the next morning and take it back to the writers and hand it back to them. Then I could start my day of phoning and so on and so forth. But, as I said, K Street was open day and night anyway, it was a around the clock operation, so that we could …. 5 minutes?
NO – We got 5 minutes and a low battery, so, if you got a place to stop soon we can do that.
BR – Ok, I … I’ll find a place very quickly. The … that was the kind of intense operation it was. And it was also just a matter of … I did … I just didn’t have the luxury to go through a big negotiation with John, back and forth, to convince him. So, that was a really nasty thing to do. I did a couple of other nasty things over the course of the next couple of years, but they were because of this expedited – crazy -- situation I was in. Dealing with the staffs, the teams, the writing staffs, and stuff, was the big issue. And then dealing with policy people, and trying to get decisions, so they could actually know what they were supposed to write into their proposal. And I’ll talk about that much more after we get back on again. We’ll cut off for a while.
End of Tape #2, first set of tapes. End of DVD #2
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Start of Tape #3, first set of tapes
Start of Tape #2, second set of tapes
BR – Ok. Well, during the brief recess there, necessary break, I did look up a couple of … of statistics that I will put into the record here. The initial identification by Fish & Wildlife Service, Alaska staff in Anchorage Area Office, that was sent in to Fish & Wildlife headquarters in January of 1972, they completed that work in December of ’71, within weeks of the passage of the Native Claims Act. They identified 135 million acres and … and … of potential int… of interest to Fish & Wildlife interest, and 145 rivers that might be eligible for consideration under the Wild Rivers provision. So, those folks knew their business up there, there was no question about that.
And … so, back to the … back to the mid-July and beyond of 1973, K Street Operation, and so forth. The big … the big problem was getting policy decisions out of Alaska Task Force. And … and I was constantly going down and giving briefings, and carrying forward various kinds of statistics, and lots of slide shows. And Park Service was doing the same thing. BOR [was] doing the same thing. And … and … and I’m sure that the that the Forest Service, though they have had a little bit easier job over in Agriculture, still had to go through something over there. But in Interior, there was this back and forth, and we had … we had to deal with also the fact that the Forest Service wanted, and had mostly an overlap, on interest areas of the Fish & Wildlife Service. For instance the … the entire upper reaches of the Yukon Flats, and up into some of the additions that we wanted for the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, because it had timber on it, they … they had some interest in them.
One of the big fights -- characterize it as a battle, fight, whatever -- at the time, was the concept -- and this is the kind of thing that the policy group was … Task Force … and … and Nat Reed’s group was trying to deal with -- and that is: there were two major concepts of land management available under the … under the law. The law … the Alaskan Native Claims Act, which originally only had parks and refuges but grew during the process of passage to have the wild rivers first added, and then, at the very last minute, the forests were added to that law. So that there was consideration for these things, which meant that you had to play off between the multiple use land systems represented by Bureau of Land Management and DOI and multiple use system of Forest Service.
And it’s somewhat complicated because the Forest Service had the principle fire fighting operation for the state of Alaska. Although BLM, at the time, was … was the major fire fighter … federal fire fighter, in interior Alaska, they still had supervisory and consultative and coordination stuff out of the Forest Service. And the Forest Service kind of wanted to bring their … their fire fighting expertise, but they also wanted to bring their brand of multiple use up into interior Alaska. The BLM, in this case, was … was adamant with the policy group saying if … if, in fact,
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you don’t put one of these parks or refuges there, the land ought to come back to us. We are multiple use, and … and … and we want to have it for our management.
But remember, all this was still slightly ahead of the passage of the BLM Organic Act so they still didn’t have an organic charge like the Forest Service had. They were at a … somewhat of a decided weakness in that regard. And I might add, that the … the frankly, the … the refuge system was at a decided disadvantage during this period of time, in a number of areas. It had a … a great weaknesses in its authorities. And ….
And … so, anyway, those … those kinds of weaknesses, boy, they just became … chains around our neck. Because, I can vividly remember going into some of those policy task force meetings – briefings - and getting hit right between the eyes with, ‘well, what capability are … do you suggest the Fish & Wildlife Service actually has to take care of this kind of resource … or to do that?’ I had one guy get up and say very equivocally … unequivocally, you know, ‘the reason the Fish & Wildlife Service is call the ‘Coo Coo Clock Service’ is because your interests have been confined to ducks, and little beyond that. So why should we be thinking about giving you areas that are so comprehensive and vast and blahdy blah and blahdy blah, because you haven’t demonstrated that you have that technical … or otherwise … or will … capability.’ And … and here I am, a GS 13, low level biologist, with some apparent responsibilities far beyond that, and … and scrambling - literally scrambling - to try to find responsible answers to those kinds of statements.
And I … and I … and I wasn’t going to back down. I mean, I … I realized that maybe the … maybe that the Fish & Wildlife wouldn’t have backed me 100%, but I barked back at some of those people about, you know … it was an advocate for the Forest Service that made the statement about … in fact it was the Assistant Secretary for the Forest Service in the OMB meeting that made that statement. And it really irritated me. But it was true. At the time, I don’t think we could have denied it very strongly. But I denied it anyway, and … and … and made some disparaging remark about Forest Service. But, in any event, the … this is in front of … of OMB … agencies … all the … all the federal agencies were sitting there around this room and I was standing up, sort of toward the front, and they were shooting these kinds of statements and questions and stuff, from all over the room. It was … it was trial by fire in those days. So … so you … you had to learn.
I did want to mention that … that we … we ultimately got the decisions, from the policy groups, in time. That … that by about the first week of December of 1973, I had 23,000 volumes - printed volumes - of 28 environmental impact statements, plus a host of other documents. What we called … what we called master plans. And I have an example here, I think … let me get it out and show it to you … some of the documents that we had to prepare … I don’t have a copy of the draft environmental impact statements but I do have … I do have … the … the first master plans that we did, in concept. And then we put out in conjunction with the … the office put out a series of brochures which were explanatory, feel good kinds of things, for each one of the proposals that we were involved in. And … and some of
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those I was responsible for having to have the writers do them and print them and so forth. Some of them I wasn’t.
The original 28 EIS’s, though not massive, I mean … added up to 7000 pages of … of cleared … what was believed at the time to be … not the best quality ... I think John Ferrell withheld his highest praise for our … for our final environmental statements. But, even here, he felt that these were really responsible environmental impact statements. They did a good job. My office, my staff, me the Coordinator, I was responsible for the mailing of these things. So I had … and for protecting them, by the way. So, we were getting them printed, in the various printers. I was collecting them and putting them in a building, which was right next to the Forest Service office, over in the Department of Agriculture. They had a warehouse type building. They never knew that we were there. But, we had all these volumes stacked all over this place, 23,000 volumes in boxes. And so, we finished the documents, and had them all printed.
The Secretary had a news conference in a … in the Department of Interior. The night before the news conference in Interior, OMB finally came back with their final decisions. They had been dickering and dick … dithering and so forth, and they came back and made changes.
And their changes were like … this proposal down here was Harding Icefield - Kenai Fjords they called it - and right adjacent to it, there’s some little islands that we had fought over with the Park Service, and finally said they would go into the Alaska Coastal Refuge package. And Park Service wanted those. They wanted to have all the way out and take the little islands off of there, and I … and I refused to accept that. And Fish & Wildlife said ‘look, managing coastal islands … marine birds … marine mammals … that’s our bag. And the Park Service is gonna want to put guide services out there, and get visitors out there, and that’s not good for those rookeries. And therefore, the … if you want protection … if your goal is protection, then you want to put it in the refuge system. The Park Service can point at it, but they can stay off shore, and they can leave the animals alone.’ And low and behold, they let us do that -- sort of.
Morton’s proposal said ‘we’ll cooperatively manage this area, have Fish & Wildlife and Park manage.’ And they did that with a couple of areas. And they let the BLM into two areas. They let the BLM into Lake Iliamna and Noatak, which they wanted to get into the management scheme, so they were going to be cooperative management -- like game ranges. This was before the game range settlement. And so we were going to have co-management by BLM and Fish & Wildlife Service of those two areas. And there was a couple of others like that, where there was an … an effort to grow bigger, if you will. And OMB said no. They allowed one or two minor proposals … [Phone Ringing] Just let the tape get it. [Phone Ringing] Wonder if it’s them. Can we cut it off?
NO – Yeah. Sure.
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Break in taping
BR – So we had these 23,000 volumes. We had the decisions. We had OMB make these changes the night before the press conference. And I was to deliver a full range of EIS’s in the back of the … of the press briefing, while the secretary was on the stage making the presentation. And we had gotten these … these OMB decisions the night before. not only was there no way to reprint the documents before the press conference, but I had a bigger worry, what was I gonna do to illustrate these changes that they made … or to take care of them, ‘cause I couldn’t go rewrite the EIS’s, get them cleared, and go to the printer and stuff. So, my big … my big decision … unilateral decision again, was I will use errata sheets and addenda sheets to cover every little contingency. So I typed these things sometime during the night. Printed up enough sets. So the next morning, while they were up talking on the stage, I was in the back shoving these sheets into these documents. And … and some of it was pretty wild. I mean, when you say, ‘no, this area isn’t going to be managed by both BLM and the Fish & Wildlife Service, read this to … to mean alternative’ … whatever it was … ‘was adopted.’ We always seemed to have an alternative in the document that covered what the OMB decision was. And so, we just said, ‘this was a … this was an error. It should show that alternative as the preferred alternative, and it doesn’t. So, read it that it does. And all the impacts that go with that alternative.’ Or, in a couple of cases, it was ‘add these things here and there.’ Still pretty far out.
Anyway, I got them all stuffed in there before the reporters came and got their sets. And then, I had 23,000 volumes to stuff -- before they got mailed. First of all, I had 525 sets to stuff, because we were responsible … and they were going to be hand delivered, on to the Hill, December 17th, the day before the deadline. They had to be on the Hill, by the law, and our proposal, had to be on the Hill by December 18th. First of all, think about it: Congress is never in town on December 17 or December 18th. But this was when the deadline was. So on December 17th, we carried -- me and my … my ragtag staff of secretaries and editors and, you know, the guys that were there assigned to K Street -- were carrying these boxes all over the Senate and the House. We delivered sets to every single member of Congress. And, almost invariably, why, we were lucky to even … if there was anybody in the office, to hand them in to. And then they would set there in the foyer until somebody came back and knew what to do with them. But, they got delivered. It included all of the environmental impact statements for every office, plus those plans, plus draft legislation that was … that was sent up there. And we made our deadline. I was very, very proud of that. Still am.
But, anyway, the other thing that happened in late … in late 1973 that had a great effect on my life, and on the whole situation, was that Robert L. Means, who had been kind of a mentor to me since I’d been in there, since he knew so much about Alaska, was a GS 13 also. And we were dealing with a lot of GS 15s and lot of GS 16s, in other agencies. we were dealing with large staffs of people that … that … the Park Service had a GS 16, a GS 15, two GS 14s, two GS 13s, and a bunch of 11s in their … in their group.
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And Larry Means had been carrying the whole burden. ‘Cause Lynn Greenwalt had started as Chief of the Division of Refuges, but then during this time period, he was first pulled up to a … to the Assistant Director’s Office as Assistant Director for Fish & Wildlife Management, and then after a couple of months they moved him on up to Director. So he was ascending through this, and he had a very full plate, trying to do all of that. And he was ‘the representative,’ you know. And he started out as a GS 14, and moved his way up through until he was executive -- GS 18 level.
But, he was busy and we weren’t going to be bothering him and he could only make some decisions. So, Larry tried to get the Service to give him a pay raise … grade. And they just wouldn’t do it. So, he had an offer from the BLM to become Assistant Chief of their Division of Wildlife, and he took it.
And so in November of 1973, just shortly before this other stuff happened, Larry left the Service. And there wasn’t anybody in that position. In January of 74, just shortly after I took all those EIS’s all over the place, the Acting Chief of Refuges, who was Jim Pulliam at the time, called in to his office one day and with almost no … no hesitation, no preliminary anything, no discussion, he said ‘Bill, we’ve decided that you know how to spell it, so you’re it.’ And I said ‘I’m it?’ He says ‘that’s right, you’re replacing Larry.’ And I said ‘what do I do about K Street?’ He says ‘well, K Street’s done’ and I … ‘or, almost done’ … and I said ‘well, not exactly. We’ve got the drafts about done, but we’re responsible for doing finals, and we’re going to be taking comments, beginning next week there are going to be people sending in statements and comments and criticisms, and we’ve got to analyze them. We’ve got to have the writers back down and make changes in the document. We’ve got to go through this whole exercise all over again.’ He said ‘oh, my goodness.’ He says ‘well, we’ll talk about that later. Right now, you are it. So keep up the good work and good luck.’
And … so, somewhere in the middle of this … I, you know, I was up there at K Street, as I said, most of the time from 4:30 until about 10 or 10:30 and … and I had no choice, I mean, I had to do it. So I wrote the staff and said ‘look,’ it was about two weeks before all this other stuff here happened, ‘I’ve got to go back down to Main Interior, somebody has to be in the Fish & Wildlife Service Office taking care of Fish & Wildlife business that the Alternate was responsible for, and I’ve been appointed to take over those duties. I can’t just stay up here. So, I won’t be around as much as I can to help out up here, but I think you guys can carry the ball. And I’ve got to go do what Larry was doing on … on other matters -- very important.’ ‘Cause he was doing things like departmental regulations review and editing and … and a lot of briefings that I wasn’t able to do; and he was dealing and wheeling with the folks in Alaska, which I wasn’t doing as much of, or at least, mine was confined to the environmental impact stuff; and interacting with a whole lot of other Fish & Wildlife offices. And you know, he had a full plate, he was working many long hours too. So, I moved down to his office and started trying to teach myself about all the prehistory that went on and all the other stuff that he was working on. And I would … I would go to K Street at 4:30 and work in … up there, doing that normal stuff
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until about 8 or 8:30, and then I would run down to Interior and occupy that desk and office during the day, doing all the things that he had. And then at 4:30 I would go back up to K Street and work there until, you know, whatever, to get out of there. And I would do that 6 days a week, sometimes 7 days a week.
And that went on for about six months, or a little over six months. And they finally gave me a position ceiling, and said if you can find somebody, why, hire him. And I hired a refuge manager who had followed me to Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge as the Manager there. Not right away, but I think he was the one after the one after, or something like that. Fellow by the name of Larry Kline, and he had … he had had some family difficulties that meant he really couldn’t stay at Bitter Lake very comfortably and so he resigned from the Fish & Wildlife Service, and … and he was off somewhere else. And I … but I … I had some respect for Larry and … and I knew that he was kind of wanting to get back with the Service. So I called him, and he was available, and he said he would consider doing it, although he did not want to come to Washington. But the idea of being able to get back into the Service was enough of an attraction that he came to DC. And I put him in charge of K Street, sometime in the middle of the year while we were … before we finished the final EIS’s, but after they were well under way. But it was a heck of a welcome relief to have him come in and start handling that part of it, although he was over his head.
Break in taping
NO – Alright, you’re on.
BR – So, anyway, that was an extra little burden that we … we just simply had to face and … and it caused … it caused some consternation. I … I was again called on the carpet in Alaska Planning Group right at the very, very end. There occurred some slippage in one of the printing contracts, and it turned out to be a National Park Service Master Plan, not one of these little ones for us. It didn’t get done exactly when they thought it should get done, and so I got called down there. And I … and … and was told that obviously, I wasn’t doing my job as I was supposed to be doing it at K Street, or I would have had that done. And here I was trying to do this other thing. And he knew that, but he was Chairman of APG, and it was his right to do that. So, he kind of barked at me, but we got over it. I told him I didn’t think that the slippage was that bad.
The other thing that happened in ‘74 then, as I was trying to pick up these other duties that were typically the quote Alternate to our Representative, was that there were issues that had been created as I … as I mentioned at the … up toward the start, that where the state land selections had created a burden within certain areas of the state where the … it left very little land available for Native ‘in lieu’ selection, and even, in some cases, for village selection. And one of those really difficult areas was in the Cook Inlet region, which is centered around Anchorage and down through to the Kenai Peninsula. And … and almost … almost 70% of the states patented lands were in this area, all around Anchorage, and then, because the Kenai Peninsula is … is considered one of the most livable settle-able places in the state,
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they had … they had actually reduced the size of the Kenai Moose Range at one point, and poured in a bunch of land selections all along the eastern side, along the Inlet.
But that also meant that … that those villages, and would be villages, didn’t have a place to select lands. And the Cook Inlet Region and their villages were demanding that the Secretary make available lands in the Kenai Moose Range to solve their problem. They specifically wanted a minimum of 250,000 acres out of … out of the Moose Range. And of course, you might imagine they wanted it in the Swanson River oil field. But even when you talk them out of the oil field, they still wanted it in places that would really seriously jeopardize that refuge.
So, somewhat out of the clear blue of one day, I get called into Nat Reed’s office. And even though I worked on the Alaska Planning Team, and I was the Alternate for the Fish & Wildlife Service, so I was in … in and out of the Director’s corridor frequently, we were also expected to respond pretty vigorously when the Assistant Secretary want us to do something. And that became more and more frequent as we got more familiar with each other, through all these briefings and daily contacts on decision making and stuff. And so they called me into Nat Reed’s office, and they said … and Nat Reed said, you know, ‘go to Alaska tomorrow and … and … and meet with Kent Frizzell,’ who is the Solicitor of Interior at the time, ‘and … and he’s going to negotiate a settlement on Cook Inlet and you’re … you’re going up there to protect the Refuge. So, don’t forget that. Good by.’ And the Director wasn’t even in town.
So, I went and got a ticket and went to Alaska that night. And … and this was the most bizarre episode … one of the most bizarre episodes in my life. They … it was in a hotel … downtown hotel … and I went and reported to Kent Frizzell that morning. And … and he said, ‘go down to the hallway, second door on the right, that’s your … that’s your waiting area. And I want you to go there, and I’ll send for you when we need you up here.’ And then I noticed in the hallway there was a team for the Park Service staff in one door; there were BLM officials in another door; and I was in this door -- all by myself, ‘cause there wasn’t anybody else to assist me. Park Service had 4 people in there, and BLM had 3 or 4 people in there.
The next three quarters of the day was spent, apparently, in trying to decide the shape of the table they were going to use for negotiating this settlement that they wanted to … and that was because Panmunjom was going on about this time, and the Natives … the Native corporation leaders had seen and heard all that stuff about the table debate and … and so they decided that this was very, very important and they … they spent that whole morning and part of the afternoon debating how that table … and who was going to set where at the table, and so on and so forth.
Kent Frizzell, who was, as I said, the Solicitor … the Solicitor at the time -acting - at the Department of Interior, had just come back from negotiating Wounded Knee. Very, very difficult situation. His chest was out to about here. He thought he had solved some major problems. This was going to be candy. He’d be out of there in a
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day and a half and had a fishing trip set up somewhere … I can’t remember where, I think it was down on the Alaska Peninsula.
So, they went through this … this sort of slowed down Kent Frizzell a little bit about spending that much time talking about a darn table. But, anyway, once they got that all settled, they had map displays like this here, and over here, only they had some of the big 1 to 250 scale maps. And then they would call down the hallway, or send somebody down the hallway, and get a resource person from wherever they needed to – BLM, Park Service, or myself. They would call in, and they would present a proposal - a negotiation proposal - from the Cook Inlet Regional Corporation, which had three people -- the president of the corporation, the deputy of the corporation, and one or two resource people, that were setting there at the table. And, so, he would tell Kent Frizzell what he wanted here, where, somewhere else, and what he was willing to offer up. And then if the … if it was lands in the Moose Range they would call me up and say, ‘ok, what do you think about this configuration here’ and ‘give them that land there’ and so on, and so forth. And I never knew what they were bargaining on the other side. But then they’d call the Park Service team in.
And this whole thing was that the Park Service wanted Lake Clark National Park very, very badly. It was one of their highest priorities in the whole state. Cook Inlet Region had the capability of helping them get a clear and free lake like nat… Lake Clark National Park or of having so many inholdings in that place, there would never be a really good, great, Lake Clark National Park. And then the state got involved too, by the way. But, at least, at this stage … so they would offer some changed village selections, or inland selections that allowed the Lake Clark National Park to get freed up a little bit.
And like I said, I wasn’t aware, at first, that this was exactly what was going on. I found out after the first day that this was going on. So this went on into the second day. And, you know, it was … it